10 Billion Devices Run His Code. He Maintains It Alone. Now AI is Attacking Him
One Swedish developer keeps curl running on every phone, car, and console on Earth. 47 car brands use it. Zero pay him. Now AI bots are…
One Swedish developer keeps curl running on every phone, car, and console on Earth. 47 car brands use it. Zero pay him. Now AI bots are flooding his inbox.
Ten billion installations. One maintainer.
curl is a small command-line tool that transfers data over the Internet. When your phone downloads an update, when your browser loads a page, when your car talks to a server, something needs to handle that network request. On most devices, that something is curl. It is invisible, it runs everywhere, and almost nobody knows it exists.
This is the story of the one person who keeps it running, and what is happening to him now.
Daniel Stenberg took over maintenance of a small HTTP download tool in 1996. The original tool was called httpget and was created by Rafael Sagula. Stenberg expanded it significantly and renamed it curl in 1998. He never stopped maintaining it.
Today, curl ships inside Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. It runs on every PlayStation, every Xbox, and every Nintendo console. Netflix streams through it. Spotify streams through it. Your smart TV probably depends on it. One Swedish developer keeps all of that running.
In 2025, Sweden named Stenberg Developer of the Year. In the same period, he started writing blog posts about burnout. He also started documenting a new threat: AI-generated fake bug reports flooding his issue tracker, wasting hours of his time every week.
The award and the burnout posts arrived together. That should tell you everything you need to know about the state of open-source maintainer support.
