[patrickdavey]

But there are, presumably, tens if not hundreds of millions of cars with curl in them now. While I'm sure you would appreciate a response, imagine the time it would take to reply to these questions? I mean it's not like it's a bug in curl...

As for "if the customer gets angry at the response, it's fine...", well, what if you're taking the time to reply and then getting angry responses? What a waste of emotional energy.

Personally I'd agree that the correct thing to do is not to reply, there's only so many hours in the day, and there's really _nothing_ he can do to fix anything.

[Damogran6]

The Poindexter in me thinks he needs a mail relay with a whitelist. Everything in the whitelist gets through (plus some keyword), everything else gets a reply with "If you saw my email in $DEVICE, please contact the manufacturer, if you really want to talk to me, place $VERB in the subject of your email.

[JadeNB]

> If you saw my email in $DEVICE, please contact the manufacturer, if you really want to talk to me, place $VERB in the subject of your email.

Never underestimate desperate people's selective deafness; when you want to solve a problem, you will filter out everything between you and it, and will see only "place $VERB in the subject of your email". The false positives from this method will be the most desperate, and probably the least congenial.

[lazerwalker]

I'm in a roughly similar (if lower in scale) situation. I maintain a popular iOS app that frequently gets emails from people confusing my email address with the official support email from the service my app is a third-party tool for. I get emails on the order of maybe 3-4 a week.

I have a TextExpander snippet auto-reply. Takes me maybe 10 seconds to reply to a given email. It's hard to give advice without knowing the rough volume of the emails the author deals with; I can imagine situations where this would be a perfectly viable strategy, or times when even that would be an unreasonable amount of work.

[woliveirajr]

So what's the point in putting your e-mail address at the end of the license/about/readme ?

If you don't want to receive e-mails, don't put your e-mail.

If you just want to receive some kind of e-mails (like just congrats but not bugs), add that information in the end. Of course some people won't comply, but that's just human behavoir.

Now, just putting your e-mail and letting the black hole eat them without an answer is very disappointing to those who took their time to read the license/about/readme, find your e-mail, put their hope that you're able to help them in some problem, and then... nothing.

Edit

Yes, I did read the thread, the original post, and so on. I'm just putting myself in the position of the average costumer, or not-so-average, that took time to read the available documentation and tried to fix something, or to ask for a new feature, or anything else. He isn't receiving spam. I'm not suggesting, either, that he should address the problem or even find out who's the correct person to blame inside the company X that did the GUI of the radio for the company Y that finaly sold it to DENSO that will sell it to Toyota...

One way to fix would be, for example, changing the license in any future version to read "If you're using this software inside any component that will be used in a car, you should display the Copyright_automotive.txt contents instead of this one".

Edit 2

As far as I could find (in https://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html), I would never blame regular car users, not even some tech users, if they couldn't find what Daniel is responsible for. The license just says:

---

  COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSION NOTICE

  Copyright (c) 1996 - 2016, Daniel Stenberg, [e-mail], and many contributors, see the THANKS file.

  All rights reserved.

  Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

  Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization of the copyright holder.

---

If you read that and can find where it says that it's not about the GPS, the mapping of the Electronic Fuel Injection, the windshield wipers, or something else, or even that it's about some specific piece of software, please, just point it out.

[pavel_lishin]

> Now, just putting your e-mail and letting the black hole eat them without an answer is very disappointing to those who took their time to read the license/about/readme, find your e-mail, put their hope that you're able to help them in some problem, and then... nothing.

He is not obligated to answer every email he receives.

He is certainly not obligated to play first-tier tech support for anyone who happens to purchase a product that uses curl.

[macspoofing]

>One way to fix would be ...

Trust me, that wouldn't fix it. As someone who works for a company whose name resembles a popular Microsoft product, putting in disclaimers (in our case on our support contact form) doesn't help one bit. They don't care.

[mst]

People forever confused the company I work for, Shadowcat, with a london hosting provider called Black Cat and with Sleepycat (i.e. the berkeleydb company). Even once both of those ceased to exist, it was a couple years before the effect trailed off entirely.

[jpindar]

I used to work for a defense contractor whose name had the word microwave in it (we made radar components and such). Occasionally someone would contact us to ask about getting their microwave oven fixed. I have no idea where they heard of us.

[SixSigma]

> putting in disclaimers (in our case on our support contact form) doesn't help one bit.

maybe you would be getting 2x the support calls without the disclaimer, even if this number is unchanged from before the disclaimer

[woliveirajr]

Well, his e-mail wouldn't show up inside a multimedia central in a car.

[striking]

It does, in the copyright section.

[woliveirajr]

Yes. Exactly. And then I argued (some levels up in this thread) that it isn't easy for some user to know what he e-mails refers to (curl?) in the way that it's displayed. Or that he could have a different copyright notice in future versions, preventing his emails from appearing on Multimedia Car Console...

[csydas]

I understand it's frustrating, but the license is there for an entirely different purpose, same with the email. Not to be heartless, but if they took the time to read the license, I would hope they understand then what the license is actually for any why emailing the person at the end is not a good idea for solving a problem related to a product that is not the licensed product. They're building up hope for themselves and then just getting themselves frustrated when it turns out they made a mistake, and that's not really fair on the licensee's part, especially when service manuals in the car are usually pretty clear on the means for support.

My last job was managing the support for a smaller university, and every so often we'd get people who just searched "Help Desk" and somehow stumbled onto our University Help Desk phone number. They'd get insanely frustrated when, rather often, we were completely unable to help them because the product was too niche or specific for my technicians to even begin to know how to troubleshoot; we had low enough call volume that the free publicity for the school after helping strangers more than offset the time spent solving a problem that wasn't ours to solve. But when the callers would get really upset and disgruntled, I'm not entirely sure what they expected, especially since my technicians would make it perfectly clear that we weren't a generic Help Desk, we were specific to a university. I have plenty of sympathy for them not being able to get good support through the correct channels, but when you know you're not at the right place and just hoping, it doesn't seem fair to peg blame on the people you know are the wrong people to contact.

Edit to reflect your edit:

I would imagine that the part that reads "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,..." should give away that this is not for support. Also that it doesn't read like a support document at all, and that it's not included in the car's support manual, and that the email doesn't mention Toyota at all. If they email that address from that page, they're not reading the file, they're just scanning for an email address. I'm not saying people who do this are idiots or anything of the sort - as someone who loves helping with tech issues, I sympathize and even empathize after having crap service from many companies. But the people are creating their own disappointment.

[pc86]

If you can't get GPS working in your car so your plan to fix it is sending an email to an address you found in a random open source license file, an "I don't have anything to do with your GPS" email is probably not going to satisfy you.

[DanBC]

Did you miss the bit that they're emailing him about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with him?

Why would he know anything about the delay in audio and video when connecting through bluetooth? Or about the GPS?

He's happy to get emails about curl, even bug reports.

[karolist]

It's obviously just people that have no clue what cURL is and when it's appropriate to contact the author of the software. The email is there to report cURL related stuff, not ask for car usage advise.