Why cURL’s $10K Award Doesn’t Match Its Global Impact

Award Announcement

In July 2022, Swedish programmer Daniel Stenberg received a belated email from Microsoft informing him that his open‑source project cURL had won the Microsoft Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Foundation award. The prize is a $10,000 grant paid over ten months, with cURL being the January 2022 winner.

cURL Capabilities

cURL provides a library ( libcurl) and a command‑line tool that make data transfer easy. It supports almost every transfer protocol, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, IMAP, Kerberos, LDAP, MQTT, POP3, RTSP, SCP, SMTP, SMB, and many others. As the article puts it, “in data‑transfer, there’s nothing it can’t do.”

Global Adoption

Because of its versatility, cURL is installed on virtually all major operating systems—Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, macOS—and on a wide range of devices such as Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation 5, Roku, Apple TV, IoT appliances, medical equipment, printers, smart watches, and smart cars. The project now supports 110 operating systems.

Daniel estimates that cURL and libcurl are installed on more than 10 billion devices worldwide. If each device contributed just $0.01, the project would generate a fortune.

Funding and Donations

Since its inception, cURL has received sporadic funding: a 2004 grant from the Swedish Internet Foundation, later support from Adobe for SFTP development, and ongoing sponsorships via OpenCollective. Sponsorship tiers range from $5/month (Backer) to $1,000/month (Platinum Sponsor). Based on publicly listed numbers, the monthly donation income is roughly $9,055.

Despite this income, the revenue is tiny compared to the billions of users and the project's operational costs, which include infrastructure, security bounties, developer conferences, and hardware replacements.

Open‑Source Sustainability Paths

The article outlines four typical routes for open‑source projects:

Build a popular side project that looks good on a résumé.

Solve a niche problem as a library (e.g., cURL, log4j, OpenSSL) and gain widespread adoption without proportional revenue.

Accidentally create a massive market opportunity , then commercialize via a community edition and an enterprise edition (examples: Nginx, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, Redis).

Become indispensable to industry giants , prompting the creation of foundations or funds to support continued development.

These models illustrate why many critical open‑source tools, despite their global impact, struggle to achieve financial sustainability.

Conclusion

cURL’s story demonstrates the paradox of open‑source: a tool that powers the modern internet, embedded in billions of devices, yet receiving modest financial support. The article uses cURL as a case study to discuss broader challenges and possible economic models for sustaining essential open‑source software.