Tag Archives: sponsors

cURL and libcurl

a Bloomberg donation

Hi curl admins, Alyssa here from the Bloomberg Open Source Program Office. I wanted to let you know that curl was selected as a winner in our inaugural FOSS Contributor Fund! We wanted to let you know of the results before we transferred funds via Open Source Collective. Can you confirm you’ve received this message? Again, we’re super excited to support your work and excited that you were selected in our inaugural vote! Please let us know if we can be of any further support. All best, Alyssa.

The quote above was received by the curl team on March 27, 2023 and…

Open Collective

All curl funds are held by Open Collective, as the curl project is not a legal entity and cannot hold on to money or any assets at all really on its own.

Bloomberg’s donation was directed directly to Open Collective and below is a screenshot from there:

Screenshot from curl’s fund at Open Collective

Grateful

We are of course grateful for this generous donation and we will make sure that we spend this money on activities that bring the project forward. A pledge we do for all money ever donated to us. We are determined to live up to the highest expectations of excellency that our awesome sponsors and donors might have on us. Now and in the future.

On the behalf of the curl project: Thank you Bloomberg!

cURL and libcurl

curl reaches 100K raised

4 Comments

I’m proud and happy to mention that curl just passed the magic limit of 100,000 USD in raised sponsorship money. Or call it donations if you want. Since April 2018. That’s about 40 months.

Screenshot 06:50 UTC 2021-07-06

Donate?

Do it here!

Donations over time

A grand total of 440 awesome organizations and individuals have donated money to the curl project since we started our Open Collective fund, at almost 1300 separate occasions. It makes the averages to be about 77 USD per donation and 230 USD per sponsor. As usual, there’s a very long tail of single sponsors that donated a small amount and there’s a small set of sponsors who have donated lots of money many times.

We use donated money primarily for the bug-bounty, but recently we also spread sticker love across the world with the help of donated funds. The fund will also be used to pay for our annual developer meetups (that have been paused during covid) and potentially for some hardware and other infrastructure to aid the project and it’s core contributors.

Note: that we also have a set of sponsors who fund services and infrastructure directly for us without funneling the money through us. The shear value of those services are in several instances even greater in total than what the largest monetary contributors have given us.

Net vs gross details

This counts the 100K USD net amount that ended up in our fund. That is with the fees involved already deducted. Gross, that means we were given more than 100K already.

Before Open Collective you ask?

We never saw any serious donations to speak of before we started this collective. Before then we received the occasional donations to my PayPal account but they were very spurious and very far apart and never amounted to any “real money”.

Independent

I want to take this opportunity and remind readers that curl is a totally independent and stand-alone project. We’re not part of any larger/umbrella organization and we’re not run or owned by any company. It gives us total freedom to do whatever we want but it also means we need to fund things ourselves and find our own benefactors. Fortunately, we have many friends!

Top donors

  1. Backblaze
  2. Indeed
cURL and libcurl, Licensing

Backblazed

10 Comments

I’m personally familiar with Backblaze as a fine backup solution I’ve helped my parents in law setup and use. I’ve found it reliable and easy to use. I would recommend it to others.

Over the Christmas holidays 2019 someone emailed me and mentioned that Backblaze have stated that they use libcurl but yet there’s no license or other information about this anywhere in the current version, nor on their web site. (I’m always looking for screenshotted curl credits or for data to use as input when trying to figure out how many curl installations there are or how many internet transfers per day that are done with curl…)

libcurl is MIT licensed (well, a slightly edited MIT license) so there’s really not a lot a company need to do to follow the license, nor does it leave me with a lot of “muscles” or remedies in case anyone would blatantly refuse to adhere. However, the impression I had was that this company was one that tried to do right and this omission could then simply be a mistake.

I sent an email. Brief and focused. Can’t hurt, right?

Immediate response

Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze, replied to my email within hours. He was very friendly and to the point. The omission was a mistake and Brian expressed his wish and intent to fix this. I couldn’t ask for a better or nicer response. The mentioned fixup was all that I could ask for.

Fixed it

Today Brian followed up and showed me the changes. Delivering on his promise. Just totally awesome.

Starting with the Windows build 7.0.0.409, the Backblaze about window looks like this (see image below) and builds for other platforms will follow along.

15,600 US dollars

At the same time, Backblaze also becomes the new largest single-shot donor to curl when they donated no less than 15,600 USD to the project, making the recent Indeed.com donation fall down to a second place in this my favorite new game of 2020.

Why this particular sum you may ask?

Backblaze was started in my living room on Jan 15, 2007 (13 years ago tomorrow) and that represents $100/month for every month Backblaze has depended on libcurl back to the beginning.

/ Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze

I think it is safe to say we have another happy user here. Brian also shared this most awesome statement. I’m happy and proud to have contributed my little part in enabling Backblaze to make such cool products.

Finally, I just want to say thank you for building and maintaining libcurl for all these years. It’s been an amazing asset to Backblaze, it really really has.

Thank you Backblaze!

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

curl receives 10K USD donation

The largest ever single-shot monetary donation to the curl project just happened when indeed.com graciously boosted our economy with 10,000 USD. (It happened before the new year but as I was away then I haven’t had the chance to blog about it until now.)

curl remains a small project with no major financial backing, with no umbrella organization (*) and no major company sponsorships.

Indeed’s FOSS fund

At Indeed they run this awesome fund for donating to projects they use. See Duane O’Brien’s FOSDEM 2019 talk about it.

How to donate to curl

curl is not a legal, registered organization or company or anything that can actually hold on to assets such as money. In any country.

What we do have however, is a “collective” over at Open Collective. Skip over there to make monetary donations. Over there you also get a complete look into previous donations with full transparency as to what funds we have and spend in the project.

Money donated to us will only be spent on project related activities.

Other ways to donate to the project is of course to donate time and effort. Allow your employees to help out or spend your own time at writing code, fixing bugs or extend the documentation. Every little bit helps and will be appreciated!

curl sponsors

curl is held upright and pushing forward much thanks to the continuous financial support from champion companies. The primary curl sponsors being Haxx, wolfSSL, Fastly and Teamviewer.

The curl project’s use of donated money

We currently have two primary expenses in the project that aren’t already covered by sponsors:

The curl bug bounty. We’ve already discussed internally that we should try to raise the amounts we hand out as rewards for the flaws we get reported going forward. We started out carefully since we didn’t want to drain the funds immediately, but time has shown that we haven’t received so many reports and the funds are growing. This means we will raise the rewards levels to encourage researchers to dig deeper.

The annual curl up developers conference. I’d like us to sponsor top contributors’ and possibly student developers’ travels to enable a larger attendance – and a social development team dinner! The next curl up will take place in Berlin in May 2020.

(*) = curl has previously applied for membership in both Software Freedom Conservancy and Linux Foundation as they seemed like suitable stewards, but the first couldn’t accept us due to work load and the latter didn’t even bother to respond. It’s not a big bother, just reality.