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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.
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:
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!
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".
Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
NTP is the one that comes to mind for me.
Basically every device uses it and until fairly recently was maintained by a single person
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.
Idk who needs to know this, but in Norwegian "runke" means to jerk off. "runk" is the word you add a prefix to in conjugation to get the different inflections
Etc...
Mark Russanovich was just some guy who had trouble fixing Windows computers so he wrote systernals from scratch including widely used psexec and other required tools if you are forced to be a windows admin. He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.
"He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks."
Thanks for this. Really brightened my day.
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
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 / etilqs fiasco with McAfee.
https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
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.
Furthermore, "RUNK" was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s. Finally, it's missing some important functions that the original 60s program had because "RUNK"s developer doesn't see the purpose of those functions and refuses to add them; and no one has publically released a fork of "RUNK" that adds those functions back in, so you have to do it yourself. Thank God it's open source.
Edit: oh yeah, and back in 2005 there was an effort to make a GUI for it, but "RUNK's" sole developer got mad because "back in the 80s we didn't need GUIs; command line is infinitely faster" and kept intentionally breaking support for the GUI with each bug fix, leading to the project eventually being abandoned.
I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn't fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I'm telling this story from memory). It's designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here's the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don't believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.
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.
I saw a post earlier about Empress returning to game cracking. For modern video games that use Denuvo DRM, she's the only person who can really crack it, as far as I know. Singlehandedly holding up the AAA game piracy scene.
She is kind of a shithead tbf and fwiw it’s more like she’s the only person who is willing to do it. granted cracking denuvo is something that is extremely difficult and only a small subset of people can do but it’s not like she’s literally the only person on the planet who can. There was that guy who would just release the yearly update of football manager, for one.
It’s far more likely the people who have that skill set just don’t really want to bother with cracking videogames and the potential legal issues that come with distributing them online.
True, but being the only person willing to do something is kind of laudable in it's own right. Like all of the open source projects relied upon by millions that are sometimes developed primarily by one person in their free time.
but my (not really my) conspiracy theory for this is the opposite of open source: when someone is good at cracking games companies like denuvo track them down and offer them jobs to harden their product and take another cracker out of the scene. like I bet denuvo is just filled with nerds that spent their teenage years in sketchy irc rooms with handles like -DooMSlAyEr- and used to actually be members of razor1911 before they realized they could get game companies to pay them 200k a year
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's exactly what Malus did and why it's harder to root iPhones nowadays (but the EU is seeing to that by forcing them to start opening up their walled garden).
Can't remember where I read it, but I think it's the dude who started AsahiLinux that shared part of his story in the scene. And a few dudes were tracked down and had the choice between a lawsuit and employment. Makes the decision pretty easy.
Doesn't help that they did their thing on Github and other public platforms instead of I2P or something.
Until very recently the whole Resident Evil modding community relied solely on a Maya 3DS script that a Chinese dude named Maliwei777 created in 2012. The community cherished that script but it got harder and harder to get the correct 3DS version to run it.
Imagemagick.
Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.
Another one is OpenSSL.
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...
Fabric Bellard's body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.
Or just genius.
I'm surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
left-pad was the first thing that came to mind for me
Azer did nothing wrong.
Laurie Voss made a bad call and should feel bad.
The principals of free software was, is, and always will be more important than every single dollar in silicon valley combined.
I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.
Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.
When the US came close to going on permanent daylight savings time there were interesting discussions there.
