curl started out GPL licensed, as direct inheritance from its httpget days, but in October 1998 we switched to the Mozilla Public License (MPL). In 2001, we added the MIT license as an additional license to optionally use in addition to MPL. We made curl _dual licensed_ because clearly the MPL license caused problems for some users – primarily because it was deemed not compatible with GPL. In 2002 we dropped the MPL option and curl was from then on licensed only under the MIT license. Kind of. ## The twist Because of reasons we cannot recall anymore, I decided to ever so slightly edit the language in the MIT license text around that time. (I strongly discourage anyone else from doing this, and if my time machine was functional I would go back and correct this decision.) The license text we then kept referring to and thinking about as an MIT license, was in fact not exactly MIT anymore. No one objected at the time. I can’t remember anyone really considering the implications at the time. Maybe because not that many people noticed or cared. It was _in essence_ still the MIT license. ## Much later Decades later, the SPDX project quite correctly and _ruthlessly_ made the distinction between a proper MIT and a modified MIT matter: they created a separate and unique identified to the license curl uses. It may be _almost_ like MIT but they deemed the differences big enough to say that the curl license is a special beast. It is since then known as the curl license. `SPDX-License-Identifier: curl` ## Sort of MIT but not I have over the years casually kept referring to the license as MIT since it helps users understand even though it is technically incorrect. Open Source people in general tend to know the MIT license and the implications of using it. A drawback with having our own license is that it was not immediately recognized and known as Open Source or Free Software; not acknowledged and verified by FSF nor OSI. ## OSI approved On April 17, 2026. The Open Source Initiative approved the curl license. It is since then officially arguably slightly more _Open Source_ than before. I don’t think anyone ever doubted or that it was actually much of a drawback in adoption or usage, but it feels good to finally have this checkmark. ## Why now? I write about this _now_ (many months after the fact) because I totally forgot that this was happening and I only recently realized OSI approved it back in April. ## The curl license verbatim COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSION NOTICE Copyright (c) 1996 - 2026, Daniel Stenberg, daniel@haxx.se, and many contributors, see the THANKS file. All rights reserved. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization of the copyright holder.

2026 State of Open Source Europe

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British Museum chair tells Big Brue festival he thought no one would find out about the private viewing

Why this workshop? “This is for everyone” or “free-for-all”? The initial vision of the World Wide Web was one of sharing and openness, to foster knowledge exchange between people and inter-creativi...

Save the date! The Mozilla Meetup series continues with talks focused on modern web technologies. To account for typical **no-show rates**, we’ve opened more RSVP spots th

Some time ago I visited a used book fair and came across this awesome piece of 80s scifi-asthetic. This book is a collection of short stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem originally published in 1964. Its English title is The Cyberiad. One story, about Trurl's electronic troubadour, turned out to be surprisingly topical. ## Spoilers for the whole story follow The inventor Trurl (revealed in other stories to be a robot) wants to create a machine that can generate poetry. He begins by obtaining several hundred tonnes of books to use as training data. Trurl gets to work constructing the electric poetry machine. In the process they have to create massive data storage containers that stretch further out than one can see using binoculars. This is considered a necessary evil to get this great invention going. The machine will not work as expected. As a last resort Trurl rips out all logic circuits and replaces them with "narsistors". Then things start working. Trurl invites his friend Klapaucius over to test the new machine. They give it all sorts of weird and wacky instructions like "create a pastoral love poem that also contains mathematics and cybernetics". Basically they do a whole bunch of prompt engineering. They talk and behave _exactly_ like people of 2021-2023 did when LLMs first appeared. Eventually the machine causes uproar among poets and there are protests demanding it to shut down. These go nowhere in part because the media secretly love the machine. They are using it to create their own content for pennies and thus don't want to see it come to harm. As all of this is going on various people develop symptoms quite similar to modern day AI psychosis. Things eventually crash when Trurl gets the machine's electrical bill, which turns out to be astronomical. He needs to get rid of the machine and manage to dump it on a visiting dignitary who takes it to his home planet where causes a supernova explosion. Trurl deems that to be sufficiently far away to not be his problem any more. ## The difference between fact and fiction In the story all the problems are caused by the fact that the machine's output is vastly higher quality than anything humans can create. Even the great Stanisław Lem could not predict that in reality the output would turn out to be mediocre garbage and _still_ lead to all the same problems. Even though the story specifies that the machine is given some "basic instructions" first, nobody tries to do a prompt injection attack on it. That would only appear almost 30 years later in 1993's _Paranoia_ novel _Title Deleted for Security Reasons_. An earlier example may well exist somewhere, it almost always does.

From the 1950s to the 2020s, Kusama produced vivid paintings, sculptures and vast installations that often drew on her experience of hallucinations