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**Jerod Santo:** You started even back on RCS, which predated CVS, and then you switched from CVS straight to Git. So you seem to have skipped a Subversion time, which a lot of people went CVS, Subversion, Git. You must have liked CVS okay... Speak to the migration process, and if you've been able to maintain your comm... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I could mention that I joined the Subversion project immediately when it started, and I was part of the core contributor team in the Subversion project for a couple of years... So I have a bunch of commits in that project, too. So I was kind of eager to see a good replacement to CVS back in those d... |
**Jerod Santo:** But you never got curl onto it, huh? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** No, I didn't, pretty much for those reasons - I mentioned that it worked out pretty good the way it did, so I've never... And then came those distributed version control systems -- I mean, after a couple of years, after Subversion was going... And then I kind of noticed that the distributed approac... |
And then I converted the entire CVS history I had to Git. That was fairly easy too, also because we had that simple approach to development, mostly in a single branch. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. When I load up your guys' contribution history on GitHub, your 11,347 commits - that's probably going all the way back to the beginning, right? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** \[36:21\] To the beginning of CVS. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Or actually I believe it might even be the beginning of SourceForge, because we created the SourceForge project page in late 1999... I actually don't remember exactly why, but I don't have the commits before -- I believe it's August 1999, or something like that. So those are the first commits I sti... |
**Jerod Santo:** Are you happy with Git? And I was wondering if you had -- one thing we've noticed, especially with Rails specifically, when it switched to Git and GitHub, there was a massive influx of contributors at that time. It looks like you have 202 code contributors over the years... I'm curious if in the last -... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I think we're gradually increasing all the time. But also Git, especially in comparison to CVS, it keeps track of authors much better. It's also kind of a lie, because when we did it in CVS days, you had to basically write it in the commit comments that you got this patch from whoever... But with G... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And yet, on your GitHub issues you've got 10 open issues, 36 closed... Do you have a different bug tracker, or is your code just incredibly awesome? Bug-free. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** No, we had a different -- we used the SourceForge bug tracker, and we used that all the way since 1999, actually... And we've only just very recently decided to stop using that. So we have like 1,400-1,500 bugs there. But since we're kind of so much in Git-- |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, that sounds more like it. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah. But since we switched to GitHub so much now, it's easier to also handle issues on GitHub. Issues, pull requests and the code on GitHub. Also, the bug tracker on SourceForge isn't that good either, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna say, having GitHub, in comparison to SourceForge from back in the day - it's gotta give you at least... And you talked before about how you talk to your users... It's gotta give you at least a better window than you've had before. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes. And also, when you've been around, you can kind of feel it, too. SourceForge was really the big thing back in the day, but of course, it has kind of gradually faded away somehow... And GitHub is now really where everyone is, and where things are happening. So of course, it's much better to be ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[39:57\] This may be an insignificant thing to most people, but I like to have a little fun on projects like yours on GitHub, and I like to go through the page history, and I tried to hack the URL to figure out how far back I can go... And I was able to take us back 554 pages of commit history. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** \[laughs\] Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So I don't know what the commit count is per page - maybe like 30-40... 25 potentially... I don't know if it's time-based or not, like how many commits go on each page, but... 554 pages of commit history you have. That's crazy, man... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, that is a lot. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The initial commit message was "Initial revision." \[laughter\] December 9th, 1999. And the next one after that was "Remove junk files." So... |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm glad you got rid of those junk files... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Almost immediately, you know? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah... That was kind of an import into CVS, and I guess I imported a lot of junk then, so I had to remove a lot of junk. |
**Jerod Santo:** So version control has changed over the years... Another thing that's changed, it seems, in the curl project is your guys' license. Can you take us through the different license variations and maybe some of the reasons for the transitions away from and to other licenses? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, we've transitioned through a lot of licenses. We've started out GPL back from the start, I believe. I don't think I've paid a lot of attention to licenses then; I basically just picked one that I thought a lot of others used, or -- I don't remember exactly what kind of process I had when I pi... |
After a couple of years I realized that it might not really be the guy I am, so I changed licenses. Then we picked the Mozilla Public License (MLP), because I thought that was kind of a middle ground. It's not really copyleft, but it's copyleft for the specific files that are included in the project. So it would mean t... |
But it didn't go very far or long until I realized that it wasn't a good choice either, because MPL isn't even considered GPL-compliant, so then suddenly I got the reverse problem, that people who were using GPL in their projects - they couldn't use libcurl anymore, because it wasn't compliant license-wise. So then I w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the license now? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Now it's MIT. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you kind of took a windy road to what is one of the most liberal licenses... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You've kind of come to find out what kind of a man you are... \[laughter\] |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, then I dropped that dual license thing and I was like "Yeah, we're going MIT license here. Completely. As liberal as possible. Do whatever you want, just don't say that you made it." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[44:04\] I like that personal identification with the license that you're picking. You're thinking like "I don't think I'm a GPL man." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I liked that, too. That was nice. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a nice way of thinking about it. And do you think that the MIT -- since that change, it has helped, or hurt, or are you happy with it? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I'm happy with it, and I think it's helped. I don't think it has hurt us at all. I think I've managed pretty good. I actually don't think we would have been able to manage a lot better than we have if we had picked another license. I think this license has made it possible for all sorts of companie... |
I think the liberal license has helped companies to not be afraid to use libcurl, and then in the end they usually contribute back anyway, if they do any substantial changes. And at the same time, the GNU projects and everything - those who are GPL or whoever, they can still use libcurl perfectly fine, and they are all... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd mentioned that in the past you've been -- I don't know if you used the word "bounty" or not, but you've been paid to implement certain features, either in a particular branch for a certain company, or even if it made it into main line... But over the years you've had several employments that h... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I've been employed by four different companies while working on curl, I think... But I've pretty much successfully been able to not have that influence my work on curl too much. I've basically always had curl as my spare time project, and done my work stuff separately from curl. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** So I don't think that has influenced me a lot. And then over the years, of course, I started working for my own company - like 5-6 years ago - and then it turned much easier to do contracts for money, to actually implement features for companies that wanted that. |
Then I've actually done -- I don't remember how many, but perhaps 5-7 different projects for companies that have paid me to do things for curl. And usually, actually those companies - they didn't even want it to be known that they were paying for it... So usually it has never that obvious to the outside that someone el... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is an odd question to ask, but I've asked this to myself sometimes, because I'm self-employed - and Jerod, you are too, so you might like this question, but... Earlier we got the average of potentially 13,000+ hours that you've invested in this... Do you think that you made minimum wage for tho... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** \[48:13\] I'm not sure. Partly, it's my hobby, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. You don't really care. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** People have hobbies, and they don't expect to get paid to have a hobby. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't mean so that we could justify "Oh, you got paid enough", but I think of it like for myself - the time I invested in something, I just wonder, have I at least... Am I a plus or a minus? Am I in the red or am I in the black? And it's not so much to say justified in making money, but just as li... |
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