Why cURL Remains Free and Open Source: Insights from Its Creator
This article chronicles the history of cURL, its creator Daniel Stenberg, the reasons behind its open‑source, free licensing, the global community that sustains it, and the personal motivations that keep the project thriving after two decades of development.
What is cURL?
cURL is a command‑line data transfer tool that works with URL syntax. First released in 1998, it supports protocols such as DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, Telnet and TFTP.
It is embedded in billions of devices—from cars and TVs to routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, set‑top boxes and media players—forming a core part of the Internet’s data‑transfer backbone.
Who created cURL?
cURL was created by Daniel Stenberg, who remains its lead developer and a senior member of the IETF HTTPbis working group.
In 2019 he received the Polhem Prize, a prestigious Swedish award for outstanding technical innovation, which includes a gold medal and a cash prize.
“I’m Daniel Stenberg, the chief developer of cURL, employed by Mozilla. I’m honored to receive the award, even though I’m a bit of a hot‑head.”
Why is cURL open source and free?
Stenberg released the first version of cURL as open source because he had benefited from many open‑source projects and wanted to give back. By keeping the code open, thousands of developers worldwide contribute to its improvement, documentation, website and related tools.
Because of its unrestricted license, cURL and libcurl have been adopted by countless products, integrated into virtually every operating system and Linux distribution, and have become a de‑facto standard transport library.
Stenberg states that there are no plans to charge for cURL now or in the future.
Why does he continue to work on cURL?
He finds the project worthwhile and is proud of its achievements, hoping it makes the world a bit better.
He wants to fix bugs and add new features.
Although cURL is free, his time is paid; donations sustain the project while keeping it independent.
Working on cURL has brought him friends, changed his life, and opened unexpected opportunities.
If he could start over, he would still choose the same path.
Even after twenty years, he believes cURL will never end and remains the most interesting work he can imagine.
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