The headline buried the lede -- this is a way to get some summer vacation (niiice) AND encourage enterprise support contracts, which will still have availability. I don't think I've heard of this particular open source / support / summer vacation business model before but I like it!
I liked the idea as well, maybe OSS should adopt 6 months availability and 6 months for enterprise support schedule. This way both could benefit, OSS gets more funding, enterprise gets support (cheaper than hiring full-time employee for specific OSS)
Races to the bottom to … do work exclusively for free and not make any money out of the hopes that they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?
Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?
Yeah me neither.
I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.
then it is up to community to fork the project if they find it valuable and can convince people migrating to their fork.
many engineers actually work that way, right? We are employed for 12 months and give our availability fully to the company and we get salary for it, why isn't it allowed to others?
Incorrect. In europe, either july or august, is the informally agreed upon "vacation month" which means that both customers and vendors scale down and go on vacation, and work slows down to very low levels. That means you need a lot less employees than usual in order to provide for the customers that do not go on vacation.
To be fair, at least in Spain, things get really slow during the summer, basically from May to the end of August, even if "officially" everything is just "slow and closed" during August. During August, anything productive is basically impossible to get done, the months around are still slower than the rest of the year.
Of course, "European companies normally ignore their paid customers too from May to August" is factious, but there is a slight hint of truth in there, in that things generally is slower, at least in the South/West countries I'm more familiar with.
In Poland smaller companies tell you outright: this and that person is on vacation, but plese call back in 2 weeks. Bigger companies will often ignore you and drag your problem through the vacation time.
Bigger companies may have only limited number of people checking the mailboxes in july and august, that doesn't excuse not sending a small reply announcing delays but I guess they take it so much for granted they don't realize other continents aren't used to those kinds of delays. However in May and June every company is totally operational ( that doesn't mean nobody take holidays ). If you request something to one named person, that sole person can have scheduled holidays, parental or medical leave any time of the year. If it is a team mailbox, you should get an answer.
I think maybe with the American PoV of "the customer is always right", that might basically feel like a slap and the face and being ignored. Of course, we should understand that every human needs to rest during the year, but if you don't have that opportunity yourself by law, maybe you're less knowing about that being a thing in other more modern countries?
Yes - and realistically, if you're $BIGCO who's shipped a billion devices with some obscure curl vulnerability you just discovered, then the hard part is going to be rolling out a patch to all of them anyway, which is still a 'you' problem.
In 2026 there is a considerably cheaper/quicker solution, but that in no way invalidates OSS maintainers' right to enjoy a summer vacation without interruption.
I worry that this will make the bad guys focus on finding zero days during the month they have free to exploit anything they find, but I don't doubt that they need a break.
Actually, submitting hundreds of bogus/low impact AI generated ones while you sit on something big might be a viable strategy to delay a project from fixing a hole you're using
Cool, then it's down to everyone using this library to figure out how they can minimize the impact of a zeroday in curl - security should never be down to a single part of a system.
Is this likely though? If you are an AI slop model that
spams out finding bugs and vulnerabilities, would you
want to become more active when you see that a project
is not actively fixing bugs? Because in my opinion, it
really would not matter for any AI model how active a
project is, when it comes to FINDING existing loopholes.
In other words, I would always go at full speed (as an
evil AI slop model) and most likely never release any
findings of flaws and loopholes, so they can be exploited lateron. Bad folks don't want to be caught; remember the xz utils backdoor.
I am sure some AI slop models are used by criminals.
And they may exploit things at a later time, but they
most likely have found issues already. Not every AI
slop model would report.
The notion of "the bad guys will now be more active" is
strange really in the AI slop age. (We had the stone
age; now we have the slop age)
For the people here who want to do the same when they are vacation (be completely detached from work): Make it impossible for you to work! Leave your work devices behind! Log out of all accounts, remove 2FA keys after backing them up on paper and tell your partner to not give them back to you for the duration of your vacation, etc. I actually went to a country from which I wasn't allowed to work remotely. Crazy but it was that bad for me.
One of the reasons I left North America for Europe is that such things are normalised. The cultural difference is staggering.
In Germany, if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.
Another neat thing is that if you get sick on vacation, you get your vacation days back, because vacation days are for resting and recovering.
> if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.
It's funny because that's kind of the definition of a vacation in my book. I find it weird that some places in the world handle it differently.
Note that it's also much better for the company in the long run: It's a test of resilience and redundany, the famous bus factor. It simulates what happens if someone is not available, and forces the organization around to have a backup plan. Having those is important for cases where employees leave the company or team (switching jobs/teams, accidents, sickness, parental leave, death, burnout, layoffs etc.). It's mind-boggling how many leads at various levels just don't understand that.
I remember vaguely from interning at a bank that there you were actually obliged to be totally isolated from the company for a continuous period of time by policy.
The thinking was that if you were cooking the books of doing some dodgy dealing on the side it would come to light without you there to actively 'manage' it.
Thanks for the reminder that this shouldn't be taken for granted. I am a German and sometimes this privilege feels so normal that it's unthinkable that it could be different elsewhere in the world.
You don't have an offered number of sick days in Germany. If you're sick, your sick. At some points (after 6 weeks) the employer stops paying for it, and the payment switches to the health insurance and drops down to 70% of your usual gross salary (with some more specifics).
Sick days are not “offered” by employers. Sick days are prescribed by the doctors and there is no upper limit. After all, your sickness will not disappear just because it has been N days. That's at last how it is in Poland.
Sweden has 14 sick days no questions asked before you need a doctors note. The German way of having to call your doctor for a flu note is a little odd to me. You do loose the first day's pay (the meme is that too many people were off sick when there was a world cup finals or something), and then 80% pay.
This is not accurate. In Germany, you usually only have to get a doctor's note at 2 or 3 days, if youre only sick for a day or two you don't need one.
And there's an unlimited number of sick days. As long as you have a doctor's note, you still get paid, up to some ridiculous limit at which you might have to get government support instead.
15 is the average. I use it to reassure people that it's okay to take sick days, and not one of those rights that no one dares to use.
Usually, employers ask for a doctors' note after 3 consecutive sick days, but the reason for the sickness remains hidden from the employer. The note just gives a time range, nothing more.
Even the concept that you need permission from your employer to take a sick day is crazy to me. After all, if you're sick, you're sick, not like a hard deadline of 15 days (or whatever) is going to make the sickness go away?
It can honestly be annoying, if you're not privvy to it.
I remember years ago needing urgent support for some bespoke European hardware we were developing software for. When we called support, we were greeted with a phone message stating the company was closed for the entire month due to vacation. This was not a one-man operation; the whole office closed for a summer holiday. We thought it was a joke.
Needless to say we started to look for a new vendor shortly thereafter...
It really depends on the areas. On white collar jobs yes. It is more frequent in blue collars workers because it is easier to close completely or partially (several lines) in a factory than having to manage different vacations schedules. Constructions companies also do stop because you usually need most workers available + hot weather makes it harder anyway. Small/familiar companies also do it frequently because it doesn't make sense to work if you have dependencies on a number or unavailable persons.
It's not entirely uncommon, even companies like Volkswagen have 3 weeks of summer vacation. Strictly speaking, some people still work there for maintenance, etc. that can't be done while making cars, but the majority is on vacation.
I know a handful of companies with a week of mandatory Christmas vacation as well (but there's typically not too many working days between Christmas and New Years' either way).
In England, I had summer jobs in factories when I was a teenager, since they needed extra hands to help with cleaning / maintenance during the annual shutdown.
I don't know if this work would have been offered to staff who turned it down, or if they preferred to have their staff on holiday at the same time.
My advice is don’t ever buy anything that might need support from New Zealand between 24 Dec and 5 Jan. The entire country is just about closed (other than non-niche consumer stores).
Many companies force staff to take vacation days during this time, and there are four (yes four!) public holidays during this period.
I think my POV on this is a bit different than what others are expressing… I don’t mind answering the occasional email while on vacation, but I view it as a fair trade - as long as the company doesn’t mind me handling the occasional personal obligation during work hours I don’t mind handling the occasional work obligation during personal hours. If the company wants to be strict about clock in/out hours or taking PTO for every 30 minute errand or the work trends in a way that routinely exceeds 40 hours per week total then I’ll stop doing work “off the clock”, but so long as they’re willing to be reasonable I’m willing to be reasonable.
The idea with vacation is that you don't think about work. When I start vacation I disable all the channels that people usually use so that no one asks me even by accident. There needs to be a time when you are completely undisturbed and disconnected. If you are disturbed by work you will think about work while you answer and maybe even after that. That's not good.
I also think you should normalize for yourself and your workplace that there are times when you are not there. If only you can answer a question then there needs to be better documentation. See it as a trail run for when you get hit by a bus. If they will struggle without you then that is a problem that needs to be fixed. If you are always reachable these problems will never surface.
I generally work for small companies, and while I'll do something very similar when taking leave (or just at the weekend) I do also make sure someone has contact details for me in the case of anything that truly can't wait until I get back. My experience of doing this has been that people will be judicious about whether something actually warrants interrupting someone's holiday, and it also results in me being less inclined to check in on email/Slack now and again just in case something is up.
I was the only full time sysadmin of a 20 person company. I went on vacation for three whole weeks. I was half way around the globe and not reachable. The company still existed after I came back. They did have a problem. They tried to reach me. They couldn't. They figured it out by themselves.
I think we believe ourselves to be more irreplaceable than we are. And if you really think you are irreplaceable then the problem is not going on vacation but being irreplaceable. Because then if something were to happen to you they are screwed.
This seems like a lot of extra work. If at all possible, just keep your work stuff on your work laptop/computer. And then keep that at home/at work. No need to sign in and out of 20 different accounts.
Seriously, that'd be nice if everyone would do this (and I do it now, very strictly) but I also know how easy for one to start blurring the lines between work and personal lives.
My company have accidentally forced this on me, and it is great.
I used to have a desktop that I could VPN+RDC into from my personal laptop or desktop to work away from the office¹. I've now got a laptop, that refuses to let me authenticate remotely and they have no interest in fixing that as there are other priorities, so I simply can't work if I don't have that laptop with me and I'm not carting it around when I'm already carting my own around (and if I'm not carrying my own, it is because it isn't a suitable situation to be bringing any laptop).
Not a workaholic, I don't think, but a 24/7 stress monkey when I think that I could be helping. Simply not being able to work away from the office actually helps with that: if there is literally nothing I can do, especially given it is work that has made that impossible, I don't stress the same way.
--------
[1] other than the VPN connector and the MFA doo-hicky on an old² phone, nothing work related, even Teams, even email, ever touches my personal devices
[2] a small old thing, factory reset with a dummy google account and just the MFA apps installed
Specifically, if your job offers (a) to pay for your personal phone line, or (b) a work mobile phone, choose (b).
We have the choice at $WORK, and many teammates chose (a) as it allows them to save some money each month on their phone bill, but now you're basically constantly tethered.
As a manager, I will quite literally ding people for working when they are supposed to be off.
Work during work time, don't work during not-work time. Good practices mean that everyone is important, but nobody is irreplaceable, the team and the work will move along a little slower, but that's fine.
I had a colleague at my previous company where we had to log her out of everything and ask IT to keep her logged out until their vacation was done every single time. Her water broke during her pregnancy leave and she still replied to someone asking her a question in Slack near real-time, after which we made her uninstall Slack from her phone altogether lol
Some people are just workaholics and need interventions to actually take a proper holiday.
Being the only dev in a startup since 2 years without a single day off where I wasn't messaged by my employer I want this. At least I'll have a 3 week out of country trip where I do not bring my laptop later this year...
I don't, but I enjoy a lot of perks that I would not get anywhere else. Thats why I stay. Basically work when I want, where I want. 100% remote if I choose to do so. Very flexible days off (maybe that's also why I am contacted a lot during those days). Almost no meetings, and relatively good pay.
Honestly, that is just bad management. It can make sense if it's your company, but even then, the risk profile is just off the charts. What happens if your only developer leaves or gets sick?
Real engineers think about handling things when stuff goes wrong, not "everything will be on the happy path forever".
Yes, there are constraints, but to me this sounds like an unacceptable level of exposure.
My manager doesn't stop overworking. When told on peer performance review that we have people who are consistently overwork because they are swamped, he played it down.
But hey, at least he doesn't encourage overworking either.
> Log out of all accounts, remove 2FA keys after backing them up on paper
Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)
I would suggest another approach. Automate your work, that you can work from your phone. I go on multi day hiking trips, or a week long family beach holidays, without taking PTO...
Edit: I do not get negative reactions. Big part of my work is to monitor system, and answer questions. I spend less time on my phone than most social app users! I still do heavy coding in office a few times a month. And I am self employed for nit pickers.
Work does not have to be sufering, you can enjoy it!
>> Log out of all accounts, remove 2FA keys after backing them up on paper [...]
>> Signed: Former workaholic.
> Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)
That's the point, this person and plenty others, are NOT able to "just" go and disconnect. If you can do that, wonderful for you, but please don't assume others are like you precisely when they are humble enough to clarify that they do have a problem and try to help others to overcome it.
I regularly advocate for offline moments so I definitely agree on the "how" ... but that's still not my point though.
What I was trying to highlight was that HOW depends on whom you are talking to. Here they just mentioned a deep behavior problem. Saying "just" or "simply" or "should" or "ought to" or anything implying it's really not that hard is probably not going to be encouraging to them.
Regarding your edit, you might be ok with going on a multi-day hiking trip or family holiday while still doing some amount of work from your phone, but many of us think that's a bad idea.
Truly disconnecting from our work is necessary for our mental health. When I'm on vacation, I want to be on vacation, which means not working.
Again, maybe you don't want to actually fully be on vacation from work. I guess that's fine; you do you. But I don't think that's healthy for most people, and regardless of health, many people do just want to completely disconnect from work for some number of days.
That's going to work in some situations, but it's not broadly applicable for many reasons. In particular it's way more work than the act of backing up 2FA and logging out of everything. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense for people to think that's not good advice.
I can only applause this decision. Maintainers of FOSS project are constantly overwhelmed with close to 0 reward and with LLMs now the management of merge requests exploded even further.
The fact that they actually keep providing support to paying users is enough.
For anyone who thinks this might matter for security:
* curl is mature enough that the chance of an impactful bug is basically zero
* if there is such a bug, I'm sure someone will figure out how to get in touch with Daniel and co
* if there is such a bug, it's more important that it gets patched in package managers and rolled out. Upstream releases can wait.
Probably not. Why pay someone who's willing to work for free? When he stops working for free, then you pay him. Open source is not exempt from economic principles.
There's a pretty big difference between a random report submitted via email, and, say, a close friend of the maintainers letting them know a serious vuln was found and they should login.
> curl is mature enough that the chance of an impactful bug is basically zero
Curl is also something that should be thoroughly sandboxed to begin with, because even if there are no vulnerabilities in curl itself, its a tool for downloading arbitrary data over the internet, and you may well accidentally trigger vulnerabilities in every other part of your environment just by downloading arbitrary data to your shell...
as much as I feel for the maintainers here, this sort of (again) puts the spotlight on our collective dependence on a handful of individuals basically working for free _with no backup_.
Most normal organizations stagger vacations to avoid these things. Most normal organizations _have_ to do this, because their customers require it. Here, we're all customers of curl, but not really. It's a weird, IMO unhealthy, twilight zone that isn't good for anybody.
And it surprises - and saddens - me that not even friggin curl has the financial muscles to have somebody on-call for one month...
You'd be surprised to learn this about free and open source software, but if a maintainer is unavailable, you have both full rights and full source code to... wait for it... fix it yourself (or pay someone to)!
There is something unhealthy in this relationship only if you project "no warranty" into unrealistic expectations.
This is true for the majority of open-source projects, but the most serious ones, on which a lot of software/businesses/infrastructure depends, are controlled by foundations or some kind of other management entity.
cURL also offers paid support and also paid access to the rock-solid (LTS) version, with guaranteed response times, and the blog post states that there's still people to respond to these.
You don't really though. Sure you can fork it and fix your issue, but then what? Are you going to maintain your fork in perpetuity? Are you going to patch all the software that depends on the code you fixed to use your version instead of upstream? Are you going to get your users to do that too?
Yes, you can maintain your fork for perpetuity if you can't/will not get your changes upstream. Why is that a problem?
If you're using any complicated FOSS professionally and you have SLA with your customers to say fix issues within day or two you don't have a choice anyway.
> Then you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you
Firing patches upstream is still adding burden to the (likely already over-burdened) maintainers.
In an ideal world, if you want a patch upstreamed, you would be contributing to upstream maintenance (or at least donating to the upstream maintainers)...
Fair, but it is less of a burden than just submitting a report with no proposed fix. Also, submitting quality patches regularly seems to be a good way to eventually become a maintainer, provided that both sides are interested (cURL generally is – at least that seemed to be the vibe at the last year's cURL Up event I attended).
> And it surprises - and saddens - me that not even friggin curl has the financial muscles to have somebody on-call for one month...
Is it that they can't or don't want to. I'm sure curl is popular enough that it could attract a co-maintainer if it wanted to. Of course there is a cost to that. Software projects done effectively by a single person are often more focused and designed more coherently. I'm not sure curl would be as good a product if there were multiple maintainers with potentially conflicting visions.
The thing which bugs me is that OpenAI (which is an unprofitable company) is spending around what 100k$ per month for an completely AI generated slop called Openclaw. (All because of Hype)
I have seen there to be an more influx of open source software as people are starting to create more software with vibe-coding and other things and just open-sourcing it, which while good in OSS'ing it but its mostly less valuable as compared to the curl codebase which was created by hand and over the years improved itself.
Yet the funding is going towards making more and more (OSS/non-OSS) AI slop by people, companies and dare I say countries yet we are unable to take the same wealth and money into, say, the curl project (and the likes)
There is also an visibility issue. We all know curl and this is the state of curl. Imagine all the projects which we all don't know that much about or aware about going through same issues.
>The thing which bugs me is that OpenAI (which is an unprofitable company) is spending around what 100k$ per month for an completely AI generated slop called Openclaw. (All because of Hype)
For whatever reason, real people seem to desperately want Openclaw regardless of it being AI generated slop.
OpenAI is certainly not wasting the money they're spending on Openclaw, even if I personally wouldn't want to touch that particular piece of software.
> For whatever reason, real people seem to desperately want Openclaw regardless of it being AI generated slop.
I can agree with it but I am unsure how much the desperation is out of FOMO or out of real use-cases.
Surely curl has more use-cases and projects relying on it than OpenClaw.
The demand seems to be generated out of hype rather than sustainability. Openclaw project isn't even an year old and from my time hearing about it, it isn't safe or sustainable in any fashion and it seems that the hype around Openclaw has now started to slow down as I hear less about it (which to me is actually a good thing imo) but it shows what the market reality of these tools currently are (at the moment).
>I can agree with it but I am unsure how much the desperation is out of FOMO or out of real use-cases.
I frequently run into people using it, they seem happy with it. I remain highly skeptical about this being a good idea, but I'm quite convinced that many people genuinely really like it and find it useful.
> I frequently run into people using it, they seem happy with it. I remain highly skeptical about this being a good idea, but I'm quite convinced that many people genuinely really like it and find it useful.
That can be the case and good for them, at the very least its open source software that they are using and it raises more awareness about them.
But I think that we have strayed a bit afar from my main premise that I think we both agree on that although the value of an project is always subjective and its up to the companies on how they direct the funds to. It's Okay for OpenAI to sponsor Openclaw if they absolutely want to.
But the question is if its entirely reasonable as to a project like Curl getting less funding overall, simply because everyone is using curl underneath but the tech is boring (as I think it should be), but this makes everyone think that curl is well-funded when it isn't.
I think that its a reasonable decision for a company to give a very small chunk if it has massive profits to curl to sponsor the project to be more sustainable, but I am not the one at the decision-making involved in that said company, so I don't know what is the rationale behind blocking or not sponsoring Curl.
Is the rationale that they can get away with not sponsoring curl in the first place and use it with its permissive licenses in its code so why invest/donate the money in first place, but this practise doesn't seem sustainable to me!?
>But the question is if its entirely reasonable as to a project like Curl getting less funding overall, simply because everyone is using curl underneath but the tech is boring (as I think it should be), but this makes everyone think that curl is well-funded when it isn't.
I think the returns fall off really really quickly when you increase investment in a boring, mature project like this.
It might be nice if people sponsored curl more, but the software isn't going to significantly improve because of it.
For people who aren’t familiar, Sweden takes summer holidays seriously. 25-30 days + public holidays is a normal amount of annual vacation time, and if an employee requests it and has the time available, it’s basically legally required to allow them to take a four-week contiguous summer break.
Not only that but the vacation is real. If someone is off then you should not expect them to answer at all (because if you do you’ll get very disappointed).
This might not be true for Sweden, but Denmark have an interesting rule that makes contacting people in their vacation fairly expensive. If I'm asked to change my plans, my employer needs to compensate me financially. If you get a call and need to work for 30 minutes, then you are entitled to a full replacement day, not just the 30 minutes. For some jobs, interrupting people on vacation simply isn't allowed.
I guess our experiences vary - our family had month long adventure vacations most years since the 1970s, and growing up we did a half year tour about the whole country when dad got cumulative long service year.
Sweden is fairly unique in allowing the employee to take a 4 week break. Is Australia the same?
2 weeks is the acceptable limit in the UK for example (where also has 20-35 holiday is common) though if you can convince your boss otherwise, you can take longer, but most people can't
Some employers "force" their employees to use a portion of their annual leave during the Christmas / New Year shutdown period (usually 24 December -> first full week after New Years Day, if not longer). So you might not be able to use the full 4 weeks continuously.
This can be an unwelcome feature for some people, for example, if you want to have a vacation in the northern hemisphere summer season instead and/or maybe you don't have substantial family in Australia (or at least, those you actually want to see).
Those with school aged children might also want to save some of their annual for the mid-term/mid-year breaks as well. (Our academic years are aligned to calendar years)
Likely varies by industry - a peer Australian (probably in private IT ?) stated it's uncommon to take a break, whereas I'd say in mining, oil, gas, civil service, police and a good number of structured contract employment its more common.
I've "retired" into agriculture and a lot of farmers take a month off after harvest time to go fishing or other wise relax (this generally means filling up a couple of deep chest freezers with fish for the rest of the year).
I work for a UK company and most people take basically all of August off (I end up with two months of vacation days a year so I take August off and sprinkle some leave around the year) and I can confirm that taking a month off is great. You forget what it's like to work, really.
Hahaha yeah same here! My $dayjob has offices in Sweden and their summer breaks are legendary. We also have offices in the US, and the culture shock with the Americans never gets old
Here's your reminder that 20-30 days paid vacation plus unlimited sick days (3+ days needs a doctor's note) is normal in Europe (e.g. Germany).
If you get sick during vacation, you get those vacation days "refunded" back. If you suddenly are called in to work, somehow, during vacation, that time cannot be vacation time.
You can't (generally) be fired without a notice period, resulting in job security to such a degree that ~6k in an emergency fund is plenty to be VERY secure, as you also get unemployment support otherwise anyway. Does this result in incompetent people not getting fired? No. You still fire them, you just have to deal with them another month after that. It's not a big price to pay.
How is this all possible? Who subsidizes it? We all simply pay some % of our income to support this system. That's it. A couple percent, a couple bucks, and we get to basically never worry about starving or becoming homeless.
You can have this, too, if you vote and protest and use democracy to make life better, not worse, for everyone.
Today is Jun 15. So, I wonder if somebody + AI can rewrite curl in Rust in 1.5 months. I think it's possible if that person knows all curl features. However, does that person even exist?
They aren't. If you ignore vulnerability report from an entity without a support contract, the vulnerability doesn't disappear just because the entities with support contracts are not aware of it
Atlas shrugged, but only for a month. I kid, it's well deserved. I do worry about their contract work loophole - if people disclose vulnerabilities publicly, their clients may pressure them to ship a fix anyway.
I've been noticing an unusual number of spuriously dead comments from accounts in good standing for a while now. My suspicion is false positives due to holding back the AI wave yet some of the casualties really don't seem to make any sense.
To be honest I don't think my account is in 100% good standing, but I can't say for certain. There's definitely some dead comments on my account that are deserved and I think there are some small limitations that are or have been placed on it (probably fairly). Mostly around flagging and vouching.
I think that if you get a certain number of comments flagged or downvoted within a certain time window, your account gets flagged as a spammer and has a permanent rate limit applied. Above another threshold, it gets shadowbanned. I think the length of the account's history is also relevant. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Yeah, I have seen several people who are completely shadowbanned (all comments dead) without any visible reason. There seems to be no way to report this.
Hmm. Interesting. If it was [dead], probably a false positive from a naughty comment filter; if it was [flagged][dead], difficult to say, potentially even an accident, or maybe people didn't like the joke. Given the non-negative karma, I would guess the first. Regardless, I appreciate the vouch.
SGTM, if I am worried about a curl exploit, I will type details into Zoo Code prompt and it will disappear in about 30 seconds and then I can upload a PR for others concerned. Enjoy your vacation and I will enjoy security for a lot cheaper than an enterprise contract!
> I have been working full-time on curl since 2019. For me, this typically means doing 50 hour work weeks, as I spend all days on it and then I top them off with a few more hours every late night – all days of the week
I wonder what is there to work on curl 50 hour weeks for 7 years?
libcurl is highly portable, it builds and works identically on numerous platforms, including Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, Tru64, Linux, UnixWare, HURD, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, BeOs, macOS, Ultrix, QNX, OpenVMS, RISC OS, Novell NetWare, DOS and more...
I think the argument was that curl is fairly feature complete (as shown by your list), is there really that many bugs in curl that require immediate attention?
If you dig into them you'll see there's lots of features that aren't adding new protocols. But incidentally they added a new protocol in March (mqtt). You'll also see that the list of bug fixes is prolific.
It's massive and complex codebase. From the looks of it, pretty much what you'd expect, lots of chores, work on the test suite, keeping docs up to date, bug fixes. I didn't see any new features on my light skim but I'm sure they land occasionally.
Wonder if this means just publishing vulnerablities without contact with curl team would be responsible (you have no other path to tell vulnerable users)
I think I'd personally develop a minimal patch and then publically disclose.
I'm not sure it's be reasonable to leave an actively exploited critical bug until August. Nor would I be too interested in playing middle man or paying for support from curl to get it out.
Why not? Only a tiny fraction of curl user get it from the upstream website/repo. Most users get curl/libcurl from their OS/application vendor or package manager, all of them having their own maintainers. There is no reason a temporary patch couldn't be produced by them in the meantime.
Why are you interpreting clear communication of a window of downtime with 2 weeks notice as a "lack of cooperation"? That's what cooperation looks like. It's not explicit but my read was that they're not even taking a vacation - they're just doing the rest of their job, a lot of which is probably going to be shipping fixes for vulnerabilities that are already triaged.
There are no "rules" for responsible disclosure. We have guidelines that we have broadly accepted, but at the end of the day whether or not you discussed responsibly is in the opinion of your peers.
There's no such thing as "responsible disclosure on a technicality". Don't be a dick, and work in good faith to keep users safe.
Look at how any "FOSS + VC + for-profit" company in the last 5-10 years worked out, and you'll see the playbook.
Now I personally wish lawyers and plumbers also got into the free work thing but here we are
Yeah me neither.
I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.
many engineers actually work that way, right? We are employed for 12 months and give our availability fully to the company and we get salary for it, why isn't it allowed to others?
Since then a diff of the two projects will be a perfect list of security issues and will make designing an attack rather easy...
Of course, "European companies normally ignore their paid customers too from May to August" is factious, but there is a slight hint of truth in there, in that things generally is slower, at least in the South/West countries I'm more familiar with.
That is not ignoring but announcing a delay.
Bigger companies may have only limited number of people checking the mailboxes in july and august, that doesn't excuse not sending a small reply announcing delays but I guess they take it so much for granted they don't realize other continents aren't used to those kinds of delays. However in May and June every company is totally operational ( that doesn't mean nobody take holidays ). If you request something to one named person, that sole person can have scheduled holidays, parental or medical leave any time of the year. If it is a team mailbox, you should get an answer.
I think maybe with the American PoV of "the customer is always right", that might basically feel like a slap and the face and being ignored. Of course, we should understand that every human needs to rest during the year, but if you don't have that opportunity yourself by law, maybe you're less knowing about that being a thing in other more modern countries?
> Probably not. But we will.
A pleasant dose of humanity in decidedly inhuman times.
> Or you get a support contract and we get to read about it earlier.
If you ever really need anything fixed in the open source world, there is always the option of doing it yourself
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...
In other words, I would always go at full speed (as an evil AI slop model) and most likely never release any findings of flaws and loopholes, so they can be exploited lateron. Bad folks don't want to be caught; remember the xz utils backdoor.
I am sure some AI slop models are used by criminals. And they may exploit things at a later time, but they most likely have found issues already. Not every AI slop model would report.
The notion of "the bad guys will now be more active" is strange really in the AI slop age. (We had the stone age; now we have the slop age)
Signed: Former workaholic.
In Germany, if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.
Another neat thing is that if you get sick on vacation, you get your vacation days back, because vacation days are for resting and recovering.
It's funny because that's kind of the definition of a vacation in my book. I find it weird that some places in the world handle it differently.
Note that it's also much better for the company in the long run: It's a test of resilience and redundany, the famous bus factor. It simulates what happens if someone is not available, and forces the organization around to have a backup plan. Having those is important for cases where employees leave the company or team (switching jobs/teams, accidents, sickness, parental leave, death, burnout, layoffs etc.). It's mind-boggling how many leads at various levels just don't understand that.
The thinking was that if you were cooking the books of doing some dodgy dealing on the side it would come to light without you there to actively 'manage' it.
This year I used my vacation time well and I already had 3 weeks off while I still have almost 4 weeks left.
I'd also add that the culture allows and encourages sick days. The average is 15 sick days per year IIRC.
Now I wonder if I could help the immigrants in my area (I'm in Hesse/Hessen), thanks for the inspiration too.
In New Zealand we get a minimum of 10 sick working days per year but some companies offer more and allow unused sick leave to accumulate.
Many countries have this system and the usual effect is that the duration people are sick for is magically never less than 2 days. It's dumb policy.
And there's an unlimited number of sick days. As long as you have a doctor's note, you still get paid, up to some ridiculous limit at which you might have to get government support instead.
15 is the average. I use it to reassure people that it's okay to take sick days, and not one of those rights that no one dares to use.
Usually, employers ask for a doctors' note after 3 consecutive sick days, but the reason for the sickness remains hidden from the employer. The note just gives a time range, nothing more.
I remember years ago needing urgent support for some bespoke European hardware we were developing software for. When we called support, we were greeted with a phone message stating the company was closed for the entire month due to vacation. This was not a one-man operation; the whole office closed for a summer holiday. We thought it was a joke.
Needless to say we started to look for a new vendor shortly thereafter...
I know a handful of companies with a week of mandatory Christmas vacation as well (but there's typically not too many working days between Christmas and New Years' either way).
I don't know if this work would have been offered to staff who turned it down, or if they preferred to have their staff on holiday at the same time.
Many companies force staff to take vacation days during this time, and there are four (yes four!) public holidays during this period.
I also think you should normalize for yourself and your workplace that there are times when you are not there. If only you can answer a question then there needs to be better documentation. See it as a trail run for when you get hit by a bus. If they will struggle without you then that is a problem that needs to be fixed. If you are always reachable these problems will never surface.
I think we believe ourselves to be more irreplaceable than we are. And if you really think you are irreplaceable then the problem is not going on vacation but being irreplaceable. Because then if something were to happen to you they are screwed.
Music to the ears of a workaholic :)
Seriously, that'd be nice if everyone would do this (and I do it now, very strictly) but I also know how easy for one to start blurring the lines between work and personal lives.
I used to have a desktop that I could VPN+RDC into from my personal laptop or desktop to work away from the office¹. I've now got a laptop, that refuses to let me authenticate remotely and they have no interest in fixing that as there are other priorities, so I simply can't work if I don't have that laptop with me and I'm not carting it around when I'm already carting my own around (and if I'm not carrying my own, it is because it isn't a suitable situation to be bringing any laptop).
Not a workaholic, I don't think, but a 24/7 stress monkey when I think that I could be helping. Simply not being able to work away from the office actually helps with that: if there is literally nothing I can do, especially given it is work that has made that impossible, I don't stress the same way.
--------
[1] other than the VPN connector and the MFA doo-hicky on an old² phone, nothing work related, even Teams, even email, ever touches my personal devices
[2] a small old thing, factory reset with a dummy google account and just the MFA apps installed
I er... think you might be a workaholic.
But I'm glad for you that your current setup is helping :)
Specifically, if your job offers (a) to pay for your personal phone line, or (b) a work mobile phone, choose (b).
We have the choice at $WORK, and many teammates chose (a) as it allows them to save some money each month on their phone bill, but now you're basically constantly tethered.
Work during work time, don't work during not-work time. Good practices mean that everyone is important, but nobody is irreplaceable, the team and the work will move along a little slower, but that's fine.
"If I see you log on, I'll disable your account."
Some people are just workaholics and need interventions to actually take a proper holiday.
Personally I’m sure I’d forget to sign out of something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI
The only people who should suffer this much are the true busines owners.
Real engineers think about handling things when stuff goes wrong, not "everything will be on the happy path forever".
Yes, there are constraints, but to me this sounds like an unacceptable level of exposure.
My manager doesn't stop overworking. When told on peer performance review that we have people who are consistently overwork because they are swamped, he played it down.
But hey, at least he doesn't encourage overworking either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI
Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)
I would suggest another approach. Automate your work, that you can work from your phone. I go on multi day hiking trips, or a week long family beach holidays, without taking PTO...
Edit: I do not get negative reactions. Big part of my work is to monitor system, and answer questions. I spend less time on my phone than most social app users! I still do heavy coding in office a few times a month. And I am self employed for nit pickers.
Work does not have to be sufering, you can enjoy it!
>> Signed: Former workaholic.
> Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)
That's the point, this person and plenty others, are NOT able to "just" go and disconnect. If you can do that, wonderful for you, but please don't assume others are like you precisely when they are humble enough to clarify that they do have a problem and try to help others to overcome it.
What I was trying to highlight was that HOW depends on whom you are talking to. Here they just mentioned a deep behavior problem. Saying "just" or "simply" or "should" or "ought to" or anything implying it's really not that hard is probably not going to be encouraging to them.
If that person doesn't have the mental strength to do any action on their own, I totally agree that they probably need therapy first.
Truly disconnecting from our work is necessary for our mental health. When I'm on vacation, I want to be on vacation, which means not working.
Again, maybe you don't want to actually fully be on vacation from work. I guess that's fine; you do you. But I don't think that's healthy for most people, and regardless of health, many people do just want to completely disconnect from work for some number of days.
That's going to work in some situations, but it's not broadly applicable for many reasons. In particular it's way more work than the act of backing up 2FA and logging out of everything. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense for people to think that's not good advice.
Much better than 2 hour daily unpaid commute at old job.
* curl is mature enough that the chance of an impactful bug is basically zero * if there is such a bug, I'm sure someone will figure out how to get in touch with Daniel and co * if there is such a bug, it's more important that it gets patched in package managers and rolled out. Upstream releases can wait.
No, that is the point, they are not going to accept your vuln report. They are taking a holiday.
But the message is pretty clear: if you’re not a paid customer, you are not getting patches or support from upstream during this month.
Plan accordingly.
Curl is also something that should be thoroughly sandboxed to begin with, because even if there are no vulnerabilities in curl itself, its a tool for downloading arbitrary data over the internet, and you may well accidentally trigger vulnerabilities in every other part of your environment just by downloading arbitrary data to your shell...
There is something unhealthy in this relationship only if you project "no warranty" into unrealistic expectations.
cURL also offers paid support and also paid access to the rock-solid (LTS) version, with guaranteed response times, and the blog post states that there's still people to respond to these.
In most cases this is extremely impractical.
If you're using any complicated FOSS professionally and you have SLA with your customers to say fix issues within day or two you don't have a choice anyway.
Then you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you. Congratulations, you just FOSSed.
Firing patches upstream is still adding burden to the (likely already over-burdened) maintainers.
In an ideal world, if you want a patch upstreamed, you would be contributing to upstream maintenance (or at least donating to the upstream maintainers)...
I guess the whole point of the article is to show that people should buy a support contract if they need support.
> Everyone with a paid support contracts will of course still get full and appropriate service even during this period.
Is it that they can't or don't want to. I'm sure curl is popular enough that it could attract a co-maintainer if it wanted to. Of course there is a cost to that. Software projects done effectively by a single person are often more focused and designed more coherently. I'm not sure curl would be as good a product if there were multiple maintainers with potentially conflicting visions.
It’s not their problem that you, or anybody else, think you are owed 24/7/365 emergency support.
I have seen there to be an more influx of open source software as people are starting to create more software with vibe-coding and other things and just open-sourcing it, which while good in OSS'ing it but its mostly less valuable as compared to the curl codebase which was created by hand and over the years improved itself.
Yet the funding is going towards making more and more (OSS/non-OSS) AI slop by people, companies and dare I say countries yet we are unable to take the same wealth and money into, say, the curl project (and the likes)
There is also an visibility issue. We all know curl and this is the state of curl. Imagine all the projects which we all don't know that much about or aware about going through same issues.
For whatever reason, real people seem to desperately want Openclaw regardless of it being AI generated slop.
OpenAI is certainly not wasting the money they're spending on Openclaw, even if I personally wouldn't want to touch that particular piece of software.
I can agree with it but I am unsure how much the desperation is out of FOMO or out of real use-cases.
Surely curl has more use-cases and projects relying on it than OpenClaw.
The demand seems to be generated out of hype rather than sustainability. Openclaw project isn't even an year old and from my time hearing about it, it isn't safe or sustainable in any fashion and it seems that the hype around Openclaw has now started to slow down as I hear less about it (which to me is actually a good thing imo) but it shows what the market reality of these tools currently are (at the moment).
I frequently run into people using it, they seem happy with it. I remain highly skeptical about this being a good idea, but I'm quite convinced that many people genuinely really like it and find it useful.
That can be the case and good for them, at the very least its open source software that they are using and it raises more awareness about them.
But I think that we have strayed a bit afar from my main premise that I think we both agree on that although the value of an project is always subjective and its up to the companies on how they direct the funds to. It's Okay for OpenAI to sponsor Openclaw if they absolutely want to.
But the question is if its entirely reasonable as to a project like Curl getting less funding overall, simply because everyone is using curl underneath but the tech is boring (as I think it should be), but this makes everyone think that curl is well-funded when it isn't.
I think that its a reasonable decision for a company to give a very small chunk if it has massive profits to curl to sponsor the project to be more sustainable, but I am not the one at the decision-making involved in that said company, so I don't know what is the rationale behind blocking or not sponsoring Curl.
Is the rationale that they can get away with not sponsoring curl in the first place and use it with its permissive licenses in its code so why invest/donate the money in first place, but this practise doesn't seem sustainable to me!?
I think the returns fall off really really quickly when you increase investment in a boring, mature project like this.
It might be nice if people sponsored curl more, but the software isn't going to significantly improve because of it.
(See https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...)
2 weeks is the acceptable limit in the UK for example (where also has 20-35 holiday is common) though if you can convince your boss otherwise, you can take longer, but most people can't
This can be an unwelcome feature for some people, for example, if you want to have a vacation in the northern hemisphere summer season instead and/or maybe you don't have substantial family in Australia (or at least, those you actually want to see).
The auscorp reddit has a yearly thread on this issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/auscorp/comments/1mw6pqt/end_of_yea...
Those with school aged children might also want to save some of their annual for the mid-term/mid-year breaks as well. (Our academic years are aligned to calendar years)
I've "retired" into agriculture and a lot of farmers take a month off after harvest time to go fishing or other wise relax (this generally means filling up a couple of deep chest freezers with fish for the rest of the year).
Is this at the executive level?
If you get sick during vacation, you get those vacation days "refunded" back. If you suddenly are called in to work, somehow, during vacation, that time cannot be vacation time.
You can't (generally) be fired without a notice period, resulting in job security to such a degree that ~6k in an emergency fund is plenty to be VERY secure, as you also get unemployment support otherwise anyway. Does this result in incompetent people not getting fired? No. You still fire them, you just have to deal with them another month after that. It's not a big price to pay.
How is this all possible? Who subsidizes it? We all simply pay some % of our income to support this system. That's it. A couple percent, a couple bucks, and we get to basically never worry about starving or becoming homeless.
You can have this, too, if you vote and protest and use democracy to make life better, not worse, for everyone.
This is Exceptional. Perfect EuroMaxxing
They aren't. If you ignore vulnerability report from an entity without a support contract, the vulnerability doesn't disappear just because the entities with support contracts are not aware of it
I thought this was due to AI slop spam before I read the blog entry.
I wonder what is there to work on curl 50 hour weeks for 7 years?
Let me Google that for you.
supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, MQTTS, POP3, POP3S, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, Kerberos), file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and more!
libcurl is highly portable, it builds and works identically on numerous platforms, including Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, Tru64, Linux, UnixWare, HURD, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, BeOs, macOS, Ultrix, QNX, OpenVMS, RISC OS, Novell NetWare, DOS and more...
Maybe there is place for a minicurl which removes BeOS and Novell NetWare...
https://curl.se/docs/releases.html
If you dig into them you'll see there's lots of features that aren't adding new protocols. But incidentally they added a new protocol in March (mqtt). You'll also see that the list of bug fixes is prolific.
https://curl.se/ch/8.19.0.html
https://github.com/curl/curl/commits?author=bagder
Then there are also HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
That's just HTTP, curl supports 27 other protocols.
It's not like the standard changed since curl was created
Wonder if this means just publishing vulnerablities without contact with curl team would be responsible (you have no other path to tell vulnerable users)
I'm not sure it's be reasonable to leave an actively exploited critical bug until August. Nor would I be too interested in playing middle man or paying for support from curl to get it out.
The responsible thing would have been to simply wait another month, considering you've been warned about the delay.
Naturally some people find that this offensive since this puts a price to that “bliss”.
And if you find something halfway through the month then oh no two weeks to reply, that's basically a standard business interaction at that point.
There's no such thing as "responsible disclosure on a technicality". Don't be a dick, and work in good faith to keep users safe.