07.22.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft: Stay in Our Proprietary Prison (GitHub) and Attract Other People to This Prison, We’ll Give You ‘Gifts’
Many projects are technically connected to curl. It’s an essential piece of vendor lock-in by Microsoft (network effect).
Summary: Daniel Stenberg still does not seem to get it; curl helps Microsoft entrap many users and developers and just because Microsoft keeps ‘bribing’ him in all sorts of ways (several recent examples are shown above — all from his blog) doesn’t mean it’s safe to stay there; I’ve long told him his program can be banned on the same grounds YouTube-DL was, but he kept making excuses (in Twitter, where he responded over the years) and would generally not listen to the substance of the argument because it was convenient to not change anything (he keeps counting and bragging about meaningless ‘addictive’ stuff like GitHub “stars”). As noted in Daily Links, curl helps Microsoft “to keep users/contributors too prisoners of such proprietary software; “Microsoft FOSS Fund” = bribery program to interfere with Free software communities, keeping them captive”; he should know better after his infamous US visa ordeals.