That’s the relevation gleaned from this Slashdot discussion, which is essentially a repeat of an earlier Slashdot discussion, except that this time around some smart cookie was able to see past the bright shining light of Tim Berners-Lee’s star power and notice that Curl (the language) is not new at all.
That’s right, Curl used to be an open source academic project at MIT, and was only recently taken over by the newly-formed Curl.com and turned into the proprietary mess that it is. All the MIT project pages have since disappeared, but you can find them by searching Google and looking in Google’s cache, the wonderful mechanism by which we all see what corporations have been trying to hide recently.
For instance, there’s this white Paper which conclusively demonstrates everything that’s wrong with Curl technically (it intentionally mixes business logic and visual presentation, for starters). This is the probably just the sort of information that Curl.com wants to charge $1500 for.
Or check out this download page, dated January 1998, which shows that not only is Curl old news, it used to be open source and cross-platform, with pre-built binaries available for Windows, Solaris, and Linux. Contrast this with the new-and-improved commercial version at Curl.com, which is only available for Windows. Source code is no longer available.
Digging further into their insane pricing policy and licensing agreement turns up the real reason that Curl.com exists: they want to turn the Web into a place where all commercial content is bought and paid for. Of course, to do that requires tracking, and that requires spyware. That’s right, the “freely downloadable cute and harmless” Curl plugin is spyware. Its secondary function is to display Curl content; its primary function is to report back to Curl.com what you’re doing, so that the content creator can be properly billed for it. Consider this extract from their licensing agreement (ironically under the section called “Privacy”):
YOU ARE ADVISED AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE PLUG-IN MAY TRANSMIT INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR USE OF CONTENT TO CURL. THIS INFORMATION MAY CONTAIN, WITHOUT LIMITATION, INFORMATION RELATING TO THE LICENSE STATUS OF ANY CONTENT PROCESSED BY THE PLUG-IN, THE SIZE OF ANY CONTENT PROCESSED BY THE PLUG-IN, THE LOCATION FROM WHICH THE CONTENT WAS DOWNLOADED, THE TIME AT WHICH THE CONTENT WAS DOWNLOADED OR PROCESSED, AN IDENTIFIER INDICATING THE PROVIDER AND/OR DEVELOPER OF THE CONTENT, AND OTHER USAGE INFORMATION THAT MAY BE USED TO DETERMINE THE LICENSE STATUS OF CONTENT, TO BILL PROVIDERS OF LICENSED COMMERCIAL CONTENT FOR USE OF THE CONTENT, AND/OR TO PROVIDE STATISTICS OR OTHER AGGREGATE INFORMATION ON CONTENT USE.
Hey, Tim, pay attention! Is this what you want the Web to be? What happened to all that pioneering stuff about the semantic Web and open standards? It feels more and more like you just sold your soul to the devil. I hope it was worth it.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim