What project or projects do you maintain and what was your motivation for creating those projects and releasing them as open source software?

That’s actually a harder question than it may sound.

My primary project is curl. I also maintain a few projects that I’m still fairly active in, like c-ares and libssh2 and I have two book projects that I also maintain (“http2 explained” and “Everything curl”). But even after those, there’s a whole slew of dormant or mostly abandoned projects that I occasionally spend some time and energy on.

Just about all open source work I do on spare time originate in a personal need or desire to get something done. An itch I had to scratch if you will. And once the thing has been released in the wild as open source and it catches some speed and traction, I stick around and work on it.

If you created any of those projects, were they meant to solve a specific problem you faced, or were they born out of a larger opportunity you saw?

In the curl case, it was started a very long time ago when I wanted to write a tool for getting currency rates from a HTTP server. That basic little program for a single task then grew to become something much bigger and powerful over the years. A lot of my other projects have then later sprung up to help me improve curl in various aspects. My work on both c-ares and libssh2 for example, have been motivated by that.

I’m not a “grand visionary” or forecaster who makes things that I think someone might need in a future. I write tools and libraries that we need now to perform basic tasks. Mostly after I’ve identified areas that aren’t covered or are served badly by the existing projects. And then I keep iterating and improving until the end of days.

How has the project evolved since you first got involved or first released it?

The first version of curl was released in 1998 and was just a few hundred lines of code written by me and a handful of contributors. curl of today is in total, when also including test infrastructure, over 200,000 lines of code and we have well over a hundred contributors per year. Our THANKS document lists almost 1500 names of persons who have contributed during the project’s life time.

We started out as a small tool with a very limited feature set. Now we have almost 190 command line options, support for 20 something protocols, we also ship a library and we estimate that curl code is used (directly or indirectly) daily by every human in the connected world! So yes, the project has truly exploded in terms of contributors and use and is a few magnitudes larger in code size compared to the first version.

In other ways it hasn’t changed much. We’re still, 18 years in, a fairly small project lead by me, primarily maintained and worked on by spare time developers and we still keep most of the discussions on mailing lists. I still know most of the code. I still spend my evenings and nights debugging, writing email and developing curl. It is still a lot of fun.

How do you spend your time on those projects? (i.e. Developing, managing the community, triaging issues, etc.)

I’m allowed by my employer (Mozilla) to spend parts of my work hours on curl, but apart from that I mostly continue a routine I established a long time ago: when the rest of my family goes to sleep, I get a couple of hours of curl/open source work done. That’s usually around 22:00 to 01:00 or so. When the house is silent and dark, I get stuff done. Well, at least that’s the general plan. Some nights I’m just too tired to actually pull it off.

As a maintainer of the project, I get far too little actual developing done and a big share of my curl time is spent triaging, debugging, reviewing and supporting others on mailing lists and issue trackers. I also spend time on writing documentation and I run, edit and admin the web site which also requires some level of attention.

How would you describe the community around projects you participate in? What are your favorite and least favorite aspects?

My projects are usually written in portable C and are tools/libraries used as building blocks others can build upon. I think that brings in and attracts a certain kind of people, usually of the older type and the ones who are already fairly technical and usually experienced.

A good part of our community is that we have very few trolls or hostile people around and we’ve never had a problem with attitudes or bad behaviors. Many good friends really!

Bad parts would probably include our lack of diversity - we’re mostly western white old males, and that I find it very hard to grow our developer base. I’m of course aware that we share these problems with many other projects.

What keeps you involved in those projects? Do you have long term plans for maintaining your involvement?

I participate in my open source projects to a small part because of a feeling of obligation, but the major driver is the shear joy. I like building stuff that people can use to accomplish things. I like feeling that I bring tiny pieces to “society” that makes it better and helps make cooler products, devices and tools. And when I’ve shipped something that people like and use, I want to stick around and fix the bugs I included so that my stuff actually works as intended!

The feedback loop, when people say thanks and express gratitude can make me go very far and put in a lot of effort.

Open source development is my primary and greatest hobby.

My long term plans for all projects I maintain is to engage more developers, spread the knowledge, spread the responsibilities, try to get more people interested and try to make decisions into a team thing and not done benevolent dictator style. So that I can become just one of the team and the project can move along without me having to steer much. I must admit this isn’t succeeding everywhere.

What is the most important thing someone submitting an issue or patch should know?

Two things:

A) there’s no such thing as a too small patch or issue. Every little bit counts and it is way better if people fix tiny problems rather than just sitting around waiting for someone else to do it. Also, small fixes and patches are just perfect to get warmed up with and get familiar with the project, its code and its community. Don’t wait, just dive in. And a fix doesn’t have to be code, it can just as well be documentation or polishing up the web site.

B) try not to get intimidated by “leaders” or apparently “experienced” people in projects. We all started out without knowing everything (and a lot of us aren’t that know-it-all as it may appear to the audience). We can all contribute and help, no matter experience levels. Actually, it even helps to bring different viewpoints to projects and since there will always be newcomers, getting a newcomers view and input into the project is also good.

I suppose both those could be put into a single short and sweet phrase: “don’t hold back”

What’s your development environment right now?

My development environment hasn’t changed much the last decade. I’m a Linux guy so I use a fairly performant Linux desktop at home, with two screens. I prefer Debian Linux so that is what I use, and I edit all source code with emacs - which I’ve learned tells people a lot about my age! =) I have a set of other machines too, like a laptop for when I travel/speak, a mac for doing Mac tests, a dedicated video conference laptop etc but they’re not the ones I ever use 12 hours straight to develop on.

What was your first development environment? Do you miss anything from it?

I first learned to code Basic back in 1984 on a Commodore 64. No, there’s really nothing to miss about that, even if I of course had an awesome time with that “bread box” and it gave me the entry point to where I am today.

I “discovered” unix-like systems in 1991 when I worked for IBM and I’ve been a “command line cowboy” ever since and Linux has been my prefered OS since well over fifteen years.

I’m not a nostalgic person. I tend to not get stuck in the past or think of certain moments in history as the good old days. I like current technology and I want to see what’s next. I want to develop what’s coming. The best development environment is what I have right now. And it can only get better!

Where do you see the open source software community headed?

Bigger, brighter, faster.

I think we’ve still only seen the early days of open source growth. I think we’ll see an even greater share of software in general switch to open source going forward. To allow companies to iterate faster and sell the next generation of devices earlier, and to allow said companies to easier change platforms between generations. To be able to collaboratively improve things, like operating system kernels or server engines. Where there’s no real need for differentiation commercially, companies will continue to gain to switch to open source and I think we will see the proprietary systems develop to more and more become layers on top of open source building blocks.

And the more companies use open source, the more they will provide code back and help populate the open source communities and projects.