Textbook of Linux

b. 1970, Sweden — Founder and CEO of wolfSSL Inc / curl project maintainer

Also known as: Stenberg, bagder

Daniel Stenberg wrote curl in 1996, initially to collect exchange rates. Thirty years later curl and its library form libcurl are embedded in billions of devices — every modern car, smart-TV, smartphone, printer, games console, and essentially every major cloud service — making it plausibly the most widely distributed piece of open-source software in history.

Stenberg is unusual among open-source maintainers in having spent decades as the principal developer of a project that became critical internet infrastructure, and in 2019 Sweden's king formally honoured him for that work. His talks and blog posts about what it's like to maintain critical infrastructure as (essentially) volunteer work are required reading in the open-source sustainability debate.

He joined wolfSSL in 2019 to work on curl full-time.