It’s really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn’t been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.

Yet the vast majority of the world probably don’t even know what it is, and wouldn’t even understand it if it was explained to them.

Git has tons of contributors though.

Seconded. https://www.fftw.org/

I heard about that last one on a podcast and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post. Genuinely interesting story (if you’re into that sort of thing). The pod was saying how it’s both a flaw of open source that it could happen that way and an advantage because it was discoverable due to the fact that the code is open source.

And those are only fully packaged user-facing software.

I’d guess almost all of the Rust code for low level hardware access is maintained by a single person. Most of them once joined forces and created a standard, it had 4 developers last time I checked. The only usable cryptography library for C# has a single developer, and while on crypto, that meme got widespread because of OpenSSL, that had a single developer who spent most of his time on OpenSSH and other BSD user-facing software.

Also, while we are on crypto, the modern algorithms were all created by a single researcher, that got famous for a work on how to decide if you can trust a crypto algorithm. Almost everybody uses his code.

Anyway, that meme first appeared because of Javascript, when a developer removed his library (with ~10 lines of code) from the language’s repository and almost every Javascript software broke.

Isn’t Linus pretty famous for his tech tips YouTube channel?

I think Linus sits at the intersection of both groups. Linus is not some Ronald. The Ronalds of this world are for example the creator of core-js.

Actually I think he has already had an adequate amount of recognition:

• “In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.[29] That year both companies went public and Torvalds’s share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million”

• his autobiography is in several hundred library collections worldwide

Awards he’s received:

• 2 honorary doctorates

• 2 celestial objects named after him

• Lovelace Medal

• IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

• EFF Pioneer Award

• Vollum Award

• Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum

• C&C prize

• Millenium Technology Prize

• Internet Hall of Fame

• IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award

• Great Immigrants Award

I’d put the deflate algorithm over the LZMA algorithm just because deflate is used by both windows (zip) and Unix (gzip). Windows I don’t think has added LZMA/xz support until recently if at all.

And Fabrice Bellard, the original author of ffmpeg, went on to create qemu which pretty much made open-source virtualization possible. Also TCC (even if I don’t think that one is widely used), he established a world record for computing decimals of Pi using a single machine that had ~2000× less FLOPS than the previous record, and so much more…

It’s also worth pointing out that this was sued in a copyright lawsuit some time ago. The wikipedia article mentions it, but here’s the slashdot discussion if you want to feel like stepping into a time machine: https://m.slashdot.org/story/158778

It caused a momentary panic when everyone realized that this thing runs the system clocks for everything everywhere, and if it got taken down by a copyright suit it would be disastrous for, well, everybody.

Wasn’t there also very recently a whole thing about the single guy who maintains the NTP spec threatened to retire so he could get a “real” job, which caused a gigantic internet-wide panic as pretty much everything we do relies on computer’s clocks being perfectly synced?

If we could all just stop making changes to time zones, that would make my job very slightly easier.

I bet he’s paid nothing to do it. Then one day, when a timing attack happens that can be traced to the DB, some knobhead CTOs and tech influencers will start talking about “securing the supply chain”. They’ll want other such bullshit and responsibilities to be shoved unto volunteers.

Two quotes come to mind “Fuck you, pay me” and “Open source maintainers owe you nothing”.

Anti Commercial-AI license

curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can’t even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.

And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).

Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.

That’s not remotely true, but it is nevertheless outstanding work and very much deserving of recognition and support.

Like half of the npm is maintained by a single, arguably awful, person who writes his microprojects into large pieces of software to maximize how often his code gets installed.

The popularity of these two packages shows that something is very wrong with JavaScript.

Is-even and is-odd are the stupidest packages ever written. Except for all the others that guy wrote.

I would love this even more if one depended on the other and just did a “not even” for example.

So they have a donation/support page?

Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you’re on Systemd, are usually better suited.

Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!

The core-js story always makes me sad. Sure, he’s developing an open source project and no one HAS to pay him. But the meager amount of donations and the tons of hate he receives isn’t justifiable either.

Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He’s been taken advantage of by the whole world.