The Internet Relies on People Working for Free - OneZero
▻https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc
▻https://miro.medium.com/focal/1200/632/52/50/0*93mCYPVf551dbAQY
But when software used by millions of people is maintained by a community of people, or a single person, all on a volunteer basis, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions. Other times, developers grow bored and abandon their projects, which can be breached while they aren’t paying attention.
It’s hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they’ve lost interest in for whatever reason — though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services.
Daniel Stenberg is one of those programmers. He created cURL, one of the world’s most popular open-source projects.