> I frequently run into people using it, they seem happy with it. I remain highly skeptical about this being a good idea, but I'm quite convinced that many people genuinely really like it and find it useful.

That can be the case and good for them, at the very least its open source software that they are using and it raises more awareness about them.

But I think that we have strayed a bit afar from my main premise that I think we both agree on that although the value of an project is always subjective and its up to the companies on how they direct the funds to. It's Okay for OpenAI to sponsor Openclaw if they absolutely want to.

But the question is if its entirely reasonable as to a project like Curl getting less funding overall, simply because everyone is using curl underneath but the tech is boring (as I think it should be), but this makes everyone think that curl is well-funded when it isn't.

I think that its a reasonable decision for a company to give a very small chunk if it has massive profits to curl to sponsor the project to be more sustainable, but I am not the one at the decision-making involved in that said company, so I don't know what is the rationale behind blocking or not sponsoring Curl.

Is the rationale that they can get away with not sponsoring curl in the first place and use it with its permissive licenses in its code so why invest/donate the money in first place, but this practise doesn't seem sustainable to me!?

>But the question is if its entirely reasonable as to a project like Curl getting less funding overall, simply because everyone is using curl underneath but the tech is boring (as I think it should be), but this makes everyone think that curl is well-funded when it isn't.

I think the returns fall off really really quickly when you increase investment in a boring, mature project like this.

It might be nice if people sponsored curl more, but the software isn't going to significantly improve because of it.