It’s absolutely incredible that such a critical piece of infrastructure has to make such an announcement. Many companies that depend on Curl would spend $12K on a new rug for the office.
Hah, this is painfully true. Humans truly are strange creatures. They will justify splurges on things like $250,000 race cars, but won't give $3 for something that their company might implode without. Freeloading without even knowing it.
Daniel has sincerely enriched all of our lives, and I will support him with virtually any decision he makes. I'm not entirely sure what he means in this by "server hosting and management" though. Like, will he operate a data center? Is there context for this that I haven't read about?
There is some amount of non-trivial work that goes into keeping the lights on for a large and popular project such as this. I imagine the $12k/yr goes to paying for his time and availability to manage this setup with a small portion of that paying for what is not sponsored directly. There are also probably other hosted services that this would cover.
$1,000/mo is such a small amount in the grand scheme of things, a rounding error to even a medium-sized, revenue-generating company.
"Server" in this context isn't just the front-end website (which is on Fastly), it include things like automatic builds (https://curl.se/dev/builds.html) and the mailing list, which would probably cost a bit of money (even if it's offloaded to dedicated services). $1,000 is actually a decent amount if you include the internal infrastructure that makes curl possible.
They should get whatever they ask for. There isn't a workday where I don't think to myself Man, we'd be so screwed if curl didn't exist. It runs more business than Excel. If there ever was a Log4j style CVE in curl I'd just become a fisherman or a blacksmith.
But.... what part? All their hosting that I could find is donated. I think he's talking about past hosting, as in, he wants to get reimbursed for previous hosting costs, not current ones.