// the find
bagder/uncurled
Uncurled - everything I know and learned about running and maintaining Open Source projects for three decades.
A book by Daniel Stenberg — the author of curl — covering three decades of open-source project maintenance: community dynamics, funding, security handling, burnout, and the unglamorous parts nobody talks about. It's free, CC-licensed, and built with mdBook. Aimed at anyone running or thinking about running an open-source project long-term.
The author has the credibility to back every claim — curl has 30+ years of history and is deployed on billions of devices, so when Stenberg says something about handling CVEs or dealing with corporate freeloaders, he's drawing from real incidents, not theory. The structure is granular and practical: separate sections on security disclosure, contributor churn, funding models, code review culture, and maintainer health, rather than vague advice chapters. The project enforces its own quality with CI checks for spelling, prose lint, link rot, and a banned-words list — it practices what it preaches about discipline. The security section specifically (disclosure, bug bounties, coordinated response) is more grounded than anything you'll find in a generic 'how to open source' guide.
It's a Markdown book on GitHub, which means navigation is branch-jumping through flat files rather than a proper searchable book site — the mdBook build output isn't hosted anywhere obvious from the repo root, so discoverability of specific chapters is worse than it should be. Some chapters are quite short, reading more like notes-to-self than developed arguments — a few hundred words where the topic warrants a few thousand. The funding section is honest but thin on actionable paths: it describes the landscape without much guidance on which route to pursue for a given project type. And while the Python tooling (uni.py, mgrep) suggests some automation, none of it is documented enough to understand what it does without reading the source.