curl is an Open Source project that is entirely free and open for anyone to download and use without having to pay anyone. So how can anyone work on curl full-time and still get food on the table for the family?

I offer and provide support to customers. Companies and teams who use curl/libcurl in their products and services who believe that curl serves a critical role in their infrastructure and who understand that I can help them with curl related issues much faster and better than their in-house engineers can.

I also occasionally do contract feature development, where I work on adding features or fixing particular behaviors on the behalf of customers' requests.

I do all curl support and contracting via wolfSSL. They are the commercial entity signing the contracts and who subsequently pays my wages.

I monitor GitHub activity from first thing in the morning, until late in the night. I act on incoming issues, review pull-requests and merge qualifying changes into the correct repositories.

I monitor HackerOne issues, so if there is a new issue submitted or updates done on existing one, I can follow-up and participate immediately. Security is always a top priority.

If any support customers have issues and questions, I deal with those.

I participate on a bunch of mailing lists where I keep up with curl and a range of other projects and internet protocol related activities.

In between the tasks listed above, I work on whatever I think needs fixing in curl and related projects. Add new things, improve old things, write documentation or maybe create new test cases.

For fun and social interactions, I hang out in the curl IRC channel, post silly updates on Mastodon and frequent a few Slack channels.