Believe me, this kind of seemingly random act of kindness warms up even the most seasoned and cold hacker’s heart. Look at this excerpt from a mail I received:

From: Stephanie T <…@google.com>
Subject: 2 Googlers would like to recognize your hard work on cURL

Hello Daniel,

As you know, we here in Google’s Open Source Programs Office are always interested in learning about new projects and people in the open source community. To that end, we asked our co-workers to help us by nominating people outside of Google that they thought were doing great things in the world of open source. This information helps us determine which organizations to fund and which projects to select for the Google Summer of Code and related programs.

Chris C and John M (Googlers) believe your work on cURL deserves to be recognized. To show our appreciation for this work, we would like to send you a special thank you gift and 2- $175 USD gift codes (totaling $350 USD) to the Google online store so you can pick out tee shirts or other gifts for yourself and loved ones.

[snip]

Thanks a lot!

(The names of the persons in the mail have been shortened by me to reduce their exposure here.)