The largest ever single-shot monetary donation to the curl project just happened when indeed.com graciously boosted our economy with 10,000 USD. (It happened before the new year but as I was away then I haven’t had the chance to blog about it until now.)

curl remains a small project with no major financial backing, with no umbrella organization (*) and no major company sponsorships.

Indeed’s FOSS fund

At Indeed they run this awesome fund for donating to projects they use. See Duane O’Brien’s FOSDEM 2019 talk about it.

How to donate to curl

curl is not a legal, registered organization or company or anything that can actually hold on to assets such as money. In any country.

What we do have however, is a “collective” over at Open Collective. Skip over there to make monetary donations. Over there you also get a complete look into previous donations with full transparency as to what funds we have and spend in the project.

Money donated to us will only be spent on project related activities.

Other ways to donate to the project is of course to donate time and effort. Allow your employees to help out or spend your own time at writing code, fixing bugs or extend the documentation. Every little bit helps and will be appreciated!

curl sponsors

curl is held upright and pushing forward much thanks to the continuous financial support from champion companies. The primary curl sponsors being Haxx, wolfSSL, Fastly and Teamviewer.

The curl project’s use of donated money

We currently have two primary expenses in the project that aren’t already covered by sponsors:

The curl bug bounty. We’ve already discussed internally that we should try to raise the amounts we hand out as rewards for the flaws we get reported going forward. We started out carefully since we didn’t want to drain the funds immediately, but time has shown that we haven’t received so many reports and the funds are growing. This means we will raise the rewards levels to encourage researchers to dig deeper.

The annual curl up developers conference. I’d like us to sponsor top contributors’ and possibly student developers’ travels to enable a larger attendance – and a social development team dinner! The next curl up will take place in Berlin in May 2020.

(*) = curl has previously applied for membership in both Software Freedom Conservancy and Linux Foundation as they seemed like suitable stewards, but the first couldn’t accept us due to work load and the latter didn’t even bother to respond. It’s not a big bother, just reality.