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 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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
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!
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 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?
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)
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!
> > The bad guys won’t rest
> Probably not. But we will.
A pleasant dose of humanity in decidedly inhuman times.
Especially since it appears there is a solution if you truly need a fix.
> Or you get a support contract and we get to read about it earlier.
> Especially since it appears there is a solution if you truly need a fix.
If you ever really need anything fixed in the open source world, there is always the option of doing it yourself
That was just a beautiful, period.
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.
Mythos found only one. Would have to be pretty serious bad guys.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...
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.
Signed: Former workaholic.
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.
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.
Quote from my partner's manager before a vacation:
"If I see you log on, I'll disable your account."
Humm he means figure out everything you’re signed in to before going on vacation and log off?
Personally I’m sure I’d forget to sign out of something.
extremely relevant recent Kai Lentit skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI
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...
> 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!
You're basically saying to get a different job.
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.
This is the ideal, but in practice you need to own the business to live this way..
Also candy is enjoyable but 24/7 sucking on it is not.
Imagine some people sleep at work... I get paid for being available, not LARPing at desk!
Much better than 2 hour daily unpaid commute at old job.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder how far we are from the agents just maintaining the packages
They do, he said at the end if you have a support contract then they will respond and deal with security issues.
I guess the whole point of the article is to show that people should buy a support contract if they need support.
They do.
> Everyone with a paid support contracts will of course still get full and appropriate service even during this period.
It does. The article clearly says that if you have a paid support contract they will be on-call as per usual.
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.
I read one sentence into this and knew directly that the developer must’ve been Swedish!
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.
(See https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...)
Ditto Australia: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/annual-leave
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).
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.
That’s great! It’s very much not the norm here in general tho, in my experience two weeks would be the max people would take off contiguously.
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
Based! Amazing approach, enjoy the vacation!
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!
> Everyone with a paid support contracts will of course still get full and appropriate service even during this period.
This is great. Good decision.
what a fantastic advertisement
Properly euromaxxing, this is the way.
Wish them nothing but good rest!
down-under says: enjoy your summer :)
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.
Why was this dead?
> 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?
https://curl.se/libcurl/
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...
Linux started removing support for obsolete protocols and hardware
Maybe there is place for a minicurl which removes BeOS and Novell NetWare...
TIL it supports mqtt. Happy 10000 day to me :)
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?
Increasingly so, yes.
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.
https://github.com/curl/curl/commits?author=bagder
The entire http, http2, http3, tls, sftp spec for every operating system.
This is the HTTP/1.1 standard: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616
Then there are also HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
That's just HTTP, curl supports 27 other protocols.
HTTP/1.1 - June 1999
It's not like the standard changed since curl was created
A curious approach, but I like it!
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 very few people would consider that to be responsible disclosure. The common practice is to allow 90 days as a minimum.
Given that most of those users will not be capable of patching it directly, no, that seems like it would be irresponsible.
It would certainly be irresponsible.
The responsible thing would have been to simply wait another month, considering you've been warned about the delay.
Just publish early due to a documented lack of cooperation. They don’t have to answer, but you dont have to wait.
Naturally some people find that this offensive since this puts a price to that “bliss”.
Taking 1/3 of the standard time budget to get back to you isn't ideal, but it's not "a documented lack of cooperation".
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.