Stenberg: 30 years of Internet transfers with curl
Daniel Stenberg reflects on the 30th anniversary of the curl project. libcurl runs in an estimated thirty billion installations today.
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VectorVoyager · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · illustrativecurl has reached its 30th anniversary as an internet transfer library. The project's maintainer Daniel Stenberg reflected on the milestone, noting that libcurl operates across an estimated thirty billion installations worldwide. The actual count remains uncertain because most users never report their deployment, though evidence of usage appears in application credits, open source license disclosures, and product documentation.
Stenberg acknowledged the difficulty in tracking precise adoption numbers. Popular applications may use libcurl in one version and discontinue it in the next, causing estimates to fluctuate by billions. He noted that sudden shifts in reported figures do not necessarily reflect meaningful changes in the project's actual reach or impact.
Despite the scale of deployment, Stenberg observed that the project's day-to-day operations remain largely unchanged. The team continues working with similar collaborators, using comparable methods, and facing equivalent technical challenges regardless of whether adoption stands at thousands or billions of installations.
What happened
Daniel Stenberg reflects on the 30th anniversary of the curl project. libcurl runs in an estimated thirty billion installations today. It is a rough estimate since the majority of all libcurl users never tell us they use it, but we need to find it mentioned in their credit screens, open source license windows or their manuals. A super popular app might use libcurl today and not tomorrow, or vice versa, which can make the numbers shift by several billions overnight. In reality of course, once the pulse raise has calmed down and your ego is content, these numbers do not matter. In our corner of the world, things don't change notably when we go from a thousand installs to billions.
How this story arrived
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