There are a lot of posts from prominent open source maintainers about this topic and from a far away, I always wonder if the solution is actually simpler than they want to admit: treat the project like a real business.
`curl` (and similarly important projects) have a tremendous leverage with the big tech and I don't see any of them on curl's sponsors page. Why not?
The sales pitch (and yes, treating the project like a business implies sales) would be simple: we are curl, you depend on us, pay us 1M/anually and with that money we'll hire the experts that we need to continue the development and support of the project. Raise a few millions (recurring) and secure the project's financial stability. Pay yourself a respectable salary, hire people.
If "the big tech" refuses, publicly call them out on it. Connect with other prominent projects and act together. The internet depends on you, you should be awarded.
I have a tremendous respect for curl as a project and Daniel as a person (based on his writtings, never met him) and I know it's easy to comment out the stuff on the internet from a safe distance, but I still wonder if things could be actually different.
So, Anthropic acquires Bun team because claude-code uses Bun. They port Bun from Zig to Rust presumably because Rust "is better" (imagine big air quotes here). Again presumably, they want to make claude-code "better". Why make it so complicated? With all the power of LLMs they have, surely they can make claude-code the best possible by writting it in Rust directly.
I remember when Chrome got released in very early beta, it was a breath of fresh air. Clearly, these are different times but I kinda hope that Ladybird (https://ladybird.org/) will become a worthy newcomer to the browser scene soon.
In the email you have linked to, he does not support tivoization. He simply says that he finds the term offensive (which is really funny coming from him).
Torvalds has also publicly stated that he doesn't think that tivoization benefits users, but it's not his battle to fight. More info on that topic can be found in the linked YT (linked at the precise time he is answering the question about tivoization, but the whole video is about GPL v2 vs GPL v3).
https://xkcd.com/1053/