"Public Punishment" | The founder of curl issued an article "Questioning" Apple: Relying on open source to earn billions a year, but treating developers as free "tool people"

Recently, Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of curl, posted an article on his blog to "question" Apple and sparked heated discussions.

It is reported that the cause of this incident is that a user named @Michael Rieder asked for help from Apple's official account @AppleSupport on Twitter, but Apple only attached the page address of curl for the user to contact curl on his own.

Such a "perfunctory" reply from Apple not only attracted questions from netizens, but also attracted the attention of Daniel Stenberg, the founder of curl, so he specifically posted a blog post to "question" Apple.

The original content of Daniel Stenberg is as follows:

“Imagine running a trillion dollar company that bundles various open source components into your products, making billions of dollars of profit annually. When one of your users reach out and ask for help, with the product you ship to your customers, you instead refer the user to the open source project. The project which is run by volunteers which you never sponsored with a cent.

Who would do something like that?”

In the article, he issued a "soul torture": Can you imagine a trillion-dollar company that makes billions of dollars in profits by bundling various open source components, but has never sponsored a penny for these open source projects?

He said that open source projects are all managed by volunteers. Without providing support and help, companies that rely on them for profit, but when users ask for help, transfer responsibility to open source projects.

So, who would do such a thing?

Subsequently, Daniel Stenberg attached a screenshot of the Twitter account of Apple's "shirk responsibility" perfunctory users in the incident, and imposed a "public sentence" on Apple.

Now, let’s look back at the user @Michael Rieder who asked for help from Apple @AppleSupport on Twitter.

The user’s question is to ask Apple to "update curl's manual page in macOS12" because "curl is built for secure transmission. The certificate string can be the name of the certificate/private key in the system or user key chain or the public key hash Hash, otherwise the -E (iOS and macOS only) is invalid."

Daniel Stenberg is obviously quite dissatisfied with the practice of Apple directly pushing users seeking help to curl in this incident.

As the core developer of curl, Daniel's love for curl is obvious to all. Before that, he also published an article saying that he has submitted 16,000 commits for curl so far. Therefore, Daniel has always been hard-hearted to "return" to the doubts and criticisms from the outside world.

As early as February of this year, Daniel "returned" some people's criticism that curl should not use GitHub-"I like GitHub".

As an independent open source project, curl has been developed until now, and it has been completed without any "infrastructure department" support. About 11 years ago, since curl switched from Sourceforge to Github, it has attracted a lot of developers and volunteers from all over the world to join, and these volunteers for the project, of course, can’t be "profit-making". Apple came to use it as a "tool man" for free.

About Daniel Stenberg, about cURL

Daniel Stenberg, whose full name is Magnus Daniel Stenberg, is the founder and chief developer of curl. He was born in Huddinge, a suburb south of the Swedish capital Stockholm. In 2017, he won the Polhem Award for his work on curl.

CURL is an open source project. The main products are curl (command line tool) and libcurl (API library in C language). Both functions are: based on network protocols, network transmission of specified URLs.

curl is a file transfer tool that uses URL syntax to work under the command line. It was first released in 1997. It supports file upload and download, so it is a comprehensive transfer tool. curl contains libcurl for program development, which can handle authentication pages in various situations, such as interactively letting users enter passwords, etc. It is currently available under the MIT license.