The maintainers of curl, the open-source command line utility for sending network requests, have announced they will be adding an ad-supported tier to the tool. Users will see an ad after every request, or pay a one time fee of $100 (no way to know what it is €) to remove the ads for 1 year. The decision was met online with mixed results.
One user on the internet chimed into the discussion, "I'm never happy to get ads in something I already use every day for free. But I do like being told about sexy singles in my area."
An anonymous product manager from a large tech company told us, "We obviously can't rely on OSS maintainers anymore. They've become too greedy and are using their popularity to force a rug pull and extort us into paying for a license. We don't have the budget for this, we laid off 20,000 people last quarter to pay for stock buybacks. Within the next calendar quarter we plan to fork the curl repo and add our own innovations on top. Like a GUI to better visualize the ads we'll serve."
An executive from Postman wrote on Threads, "Not so easy to maintain request/response software, now is it?"
It's not clear if the decision will be reversed. But given the greed OSS maintainers have, it's advised to purchase a license now before the cost goes up.