Honestly, this could be referring to most open-source projects. I’d imagine many of the popular ones were originally made to solve a problem for themselves and then everyone jumps onboard with that solution.

Linux itself also kinda fits here considering it was meant to just sort of be a small project in the beginning and I doubt Linus ever could have predicted what it became.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 80 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I have a tiny php library for a somewhat popular framework. It was made so a company could protect a very old database and certain tables. It started as a one off 9 years ago. It was one php file of less than 50 lines.

As of this month it has been downloaded 2 million times. I still can't believe its been used this much. And I'm the only maintainer. If I wanted to I could ruin a lot of peoples days. But I won't.

In a couple of decades, we are going to have large swaths of code that will outlive its creators being used on essential infrastructure.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Which one?

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Laravel.

[–] wibble@reddthat.com 2 points 3 days ago

Whelp.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

"most" is a bit strong. Many open source projects never get users or any kind of traction, they're just a passion project for the author. The lucky few fill a need and take off. Review the package usage count on npm or the GitHub stars for projects - there's a tiny fraction that make it big.

[–] mech@feddit.org 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Considering that making it big just means a lot of responsibility, angry messages, AI-driven bug reports and still no pay, I wouldn't call them lucky.

[–] stephen01king@piefed.zip 4 points 3 days ago

I would, sarcastically.