“I started working for wolfSSL, doing curl full-time. It just took 21 years to make curl my job.”
curl runs in more than ten billion installations, at least one on each of the world’s 7 billion phones and 1 billion tablets. It grew from 2,200 lines in 1998 to 155,100 today, mostly written in the hours after Stenberg’s partner went to bed. The bug bounty has paid 48,580 USD across its whole life. Every phone maker on Earth ships it, and it took 21 years for one company to pay him to work on it.