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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.
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.
I'm surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
Eh, bagder is more than "just some guy" to a lot of people! To me he's kinda been my tech idol for 20 years lol, he also was a core part of building Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) which was the first open source project I got seriously involved in as a kid ☺️
"Just some guy" doesn't mean they aren't amazing. I would argue the opposite. It just means they didn't use their abilities to become rich and famous like some other assholes. They're almost certainly more capable than them, not less.
I think that would be a great situation to be in.
You have created a cool thing a lot of people use, by being good at something. You've done something.
Also, people have no idea who you are. Nobody is digging through your trash, harassing the people you love, taking pictures of you wherever you go including on your bad hair days, etc. You're just some guy.
Runk means masturbation in Icelandic so that adds another layer of hilarity to this
Same in Swedish
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".
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.
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.
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...
Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
I remember reading a story here not too long ago about a guy who broke the internet by taking his code away because some big company forced to have his package's name or something along those lines
That's leftpad. The package name dispute was over something else, but they pulled all their packages from npm in protest. Turned out leftpad was a transient dependency for a huge swathe of all JavaScript.
The do-nothings vs the did-somethings.
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
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'm telling this story from memory
pun intended? ;D
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.
MAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder
You're thinking of LAME. MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
See why those names are kinda dumb? You end up with a lot of fairly similar 4 letter words.
Noted. When I develop an essential piece of software, I will name it George.
Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?
I think this probably applies...
So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.
In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc...) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).
There are still updates regularly released for it too!
I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.
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.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the classic example. Jobs has some technical skill, but not a lot. He's the "ideas guy" that all other "ideas guy" try to be. I don't have a lot of respect for the "idea guy"; Jobs was a manipulative narcissist, and he should not be emulated.
Woz, OTOH, is an absolute genius, and one of the most genuinely nice people you'll ever meet. Apple made him enough money that he can do whatever he wanted with his life, and what he wanted was to do cool things with computers and pull harmless pranks.
Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. That was more of a collaboration. They all had some level of technical and business skill mixed together. It wasn't quite the complementary skillset we see with Jobs and Woz. A lot of Microsoft's success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
A lot of Microsoft's success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
It was also having friends on the IBM board that signed a contract that didn't make any commercial sense....
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.
Numpy
Imagemagick.
Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.
Another one is OpenSSL.
