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Comment by michaelbuckbee

5 years ago

Some context: Daniel is the primary maintainer of curl (the ubiquitous utility and library for HTTP requests) [1]

His name often shows up in the licensing disclosures/attributions of applications that include curl.

The general opaqueness of modern software leads people to latch onto him and his email for all manner of things, and for non developers to attribute to him all sorts of bad motives ("You hacked me!").

This is especially unfortunate as Daniel has been such a genuinely positive and helpful face to a popular open source project. I feel awful that his generosity gets repaid with this kind of crap.

1 - https://github.com/sponsors/bagder

6 comments

michaelbuckbee

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oblio  5 years ago

It's just the law of big numbers in play. Do something that impacts enough people and the crazies will for sure come out of the woodwork.

  • jacquesm  5 years ago

    This is quite true. I've had my 'fifteen minutes of fame' back in the 90's, and it led to years of crazies approaching me with all kinds of idiocy.

  • aasasd  5 years ago

    That's the exact reason why I don't leave my real information anywhere on public web. Or at least try not to.

    Weird that people spend each day on Facebook and Reddit among unhinged bozos, and still fail to realize how it might not be the best idea to spam their name and location on the web for all to see.

ProAm  5 years ago

> This is especially unfortunate as Daniel has been such a genuinely positive and helpful face to a popular open source project.

I can't agree more, Daniel is one of the friendliest approachable maintainers out there. Several times he takes time to answer menial questions and is friendly about it. I recommend the curl mailing list if you work with it in any manner as for you will learn a lot from other people.

dharmab  5 years ago

I wonder if Daniel would have received less unwanted correspondence if he had set up some kind of a foundation/shell for curl's IP from an early stage.