Many of us have prepared instructions and critical information for our family in the event of our sudden demise. For Daniel Stenberg, that includes passwords for his Google and GitHub accounts. That’s because he’s the founder of curl, an open source internet transfer engine that has been downloaded billions of times and is used to transfer data to and from computer servers. It was first released by Mr Stenberg in 1996 and is now used by millions every day. It’s important that someone is able to maintain curl when he steps away.
I just want to make sure that everything is there so the day I go away, someone can take over, Mr Stenberg says. It’s a problem confronting many of the open source software pioneers who transformed the technology world in the 1990s and early 2000s. Their ethos was that anyone could contribute to the development of an open source application or operating system – and the software and underlying code could be used, modified, and distributed for free.
The open source movement broke the stranglehold of big technology companies, spurred innovation and underpins much of today’s technology landscape. In 1999, Loris Degioanni made his first contributions to an open source network analysis tool that eventually became Wireshark, as part of his master’s thesis. My concern was graduating, he says, not succession planning or the long-term future of the project.
Almost 30 years on, Mr Degioanni is now CTO and founder of cybersecurity firm Sysdig, which is a key sponsor of Wireshark. We’re approaching the time when the founders of these early open source projects are starting to get old, he says.
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