Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
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.
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.
And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).
I cannot for the life of me find what you’re referencing. I only remember the
sqlite/etilqsfiasco with McAfee.https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
It’s okay you can just say FFmpeg
Also Linux
Also CoreJS
Also
Paul Eggart is the primary maintainer for tzdb, and has been for the past 20 years.
Tzdb is the database that maintains all of the information about timezones, timezone changes, leap whatever’s and everything else. It’s present on just about every computer on the planet and plays an important role in making sure all of the things do time correctly.If he gets hit by a bus, ICANN is responsible for finding someone else to maintain the list.
Sqlite is the most widely used database engine, and is primarily developed by a small handful of people.
ImageMagick is probably the most iconic example. Primarily developed by John Cristy since 1987, it’s used in a hilarious number of places for basic image operations. When a security bug was found in it a bit ago, basically every server needed to be patched because they all do something with images.
There is a guy named Arthur David Olson who maintains a small database of all the time zones in the world, including things like leap seconds and such. It’s used by everybody and it is updated several times a year. See here:
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”.
If we could all just stop making changes to time zones, that would make my job very slightly easier.
Perhaps we’ll move to UTC+10¼, and then move forward 45 minutes in the summer.
If the day number is a prime, then we’ll go back π hours.
Hope that will help!
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?
I’d say ffmpeg is a good example, it’s used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.
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…
Oh and then you get all the projects with recursive acronyms, like WINE Is Not Emulation, MAME Ain’t (an) Mp3 Encoder, and of course GNU’s Not Unix.
Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
