This is true for the majority of open-source projects, but the most serious ones, on which a lot of software/businesses/infrastructure depends, are controlled by foundations or some kind of other management entity.
replycURL also offers paid support and also paid access to the rock-solid (LTS) version, with guaranteed response times, and the blog post states that there's still people to respond to these.
You don't really though. Sure you can fork it and fix your issue, but then what? Are you going to maintain your fork in perpetuity? Are you going to patch all the software that depends on the code you fixed to use your version instead of upstream? Are you going to get your users to do that too?
replyIn most cases this is extremely impractical.
> but then what?
replyThen you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you. Congratulations, you just FOSSed.
> Then you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you
replyFiring patches upstream is still adding burden to the (likely already over-burdened) maintainers.
In an ideal world, if you want a patch upstreamed, you would be contributing to upstream maintenance (or at least donating to the upstream maintainers)...
Fair, but it is less of a burden than just submitting a report with no proposed fix. Also, submitting quality patches regularly seems to be a good way to eventually become a maintainer, provided that both sides are interested (cURL generally is – at least that seemed to be the vibe at the last year's cURL Up event I attended).
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