I’ve heard people mention curl and imagemagick. Any others that you know about?
Log4j was a fun one to watch unfold everywhere when things went haywire
The neat thing about the log4j thing was even a cursory explanation of the vulnerability made anyone with a passing familiarity with security say, “Why the fuck would that even be a feature?!”
Wait until you learn that PDFs support embedded Javascript.
??? What the what now?
What was it?
The core-js library is used by 1000s of top websites and is maintained by one guy
https://github.com/zloirock/core-jsHe also went to prison
It’s honestly a fascinating read. We count so much on these kinds of people to keep our way of life intact, but when they ask for a little help in their own life, they get spat on.
Sci-Hub anyone?
Alexandra Elbakyan manages this truly awesome source of scientific papers completely on her own. She got sued twice and lost, had to change the URL multiple times due to takedowns and only gets along by donations.
It is a crime to humanity to lock knowledge behind a huge paywall. She does God’s work.
And it’s not like the actual scientists/academics support knowledge being locked away either, or profit from it.
shit, scihub is easier to use than the library, so we’re all grateful to her too.
She’s the best thing that’s happened to the s scientific publishing field. I’m no longer a student but I still enjoy reading scientific papers and I’ll be damned if I have to pay $20 per article (which doesn’t go to the authors) since I no longer have access to a library that maintains relationships with these big publishers.
A developer maintained a NodeJS package called left-pad that would add leading whitespace to strings. He unpublished the package and broke basically the entire Node ecosystem until the repo owner forcibly republished it against the author’s wishes.
Would you like to hear an OpenSSL joke?
It’s 64k letters long and you can repeat it back to me when I’m done.
It’s “A”.
I don’t get it. What’s funny about "A complete film set up for the day less than a week and a half hours or so to get a new Hampshire the same thing we have to do yay for it to be done with the repellant the same thing we have to do you have to be a car or a goat does it make you feel better than I expected it to my mother-in-law and I will be there in a few minutes to be there for you to get back to me is getting a little bit of a man on the way to work through the ditches the other day and I will be there in the morning and I will be there in the morning…
Did you just keep tapping the center predicted text suggestion?
cURL was one of these for a while (according to my limited understanding)
It was made in the 90s and it didn’t get commercial support until a few years ago.
Werner Koch, the guy who created, and who has maintained for 25 years now, pretty much all by himself, GnuPG, the modern email encryption replacement for PGP.
Just the other day, I realized I actually live just a few kms away from the guy, here in Germany … very tempted to reach out to him someday and actually buy him an actual coffee.
FFmpeg, libc
In the same kind of vein as imagemagick, Dave Coffin’s dcraw tool at least partly underlies almost every non-proprietary RAW image decoder, and some of the commercial ones (if they don’t use code, they use constant matrices and such).
He’s not a sole maintainer to any of his major projects anymore, but honorable mention to Fabrice Bellard who initiated both ffmpeg and qemu among other notable activities.
IIRC the Expat XML parser that’s embedded everywhere was basically on spare-time maintenance by Clark Cooper and Fred Drake for a couple decades, but I think they have a little more resources now.
SQLite is a BDFL situation more than single-maintainer, but D. Richard Hipp still has his hands on everything, and there are only a relatively small number of folks with commit access.
Basically every Windows sysadmin is indebted to Mark Russinovich and SysInternals. Fortunetly, PowerToys has come a long way because I’m pretty sure sysinternals haven’t been updated since Windows XP.
Mark Russinovich now works for Microsoft and they own Sysinternals. Also the tools get updated quite regularly.
“Mark works for MS” is a massive understatement. He’s CTO of Azure now.
And speaking of Sysinternals, arguably the most exciting update was when ProcessExplorer got a dark mode late last year :)
Wait? ProcessExplorer has dark mode???!
Not a package but FileZilla is developed by Tim Kosse for over 20 years. I know that there are a lot of other FTP-Clients but FileZilla is my favorite. Easy to use and very very stable. There is a pro version sure, but most of the time the regular one does the job. My company throws thousands of dollars a month at Adobe, Microsoft and others. But they would never even think about giving anything to Tim Kosse and others, even though I’ve probably saved days of work with tools like this.
Node frameworks are famous for this purely because of a lack of standard library. I feel like most languages have a standard library that balance being generic but still providing utilities of common used stuff. So a company that doesn’t want to rely on a random guy’s library can build their own with only the features they want. But with Node, any complicated feature is using a tree of hundreds of random packages that you have no idea who created them.
Someone ought to write a Node.js fork that includes native implementations of popular modules that are unlikely to need maintenance like isodd. Then come with a custom version of NPM that refuse to install the packages.
Deno basically did this by including a standard library that removes the need for the most popular modules. It’s the best js/ts experience I’ve ever had.
I believe the nodejs fiasco is what prompted this comic?https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
Another example is a large number of libraries using an external dependency to check if a number is odd.
TzData is basically maintained by 2 guys. Pretty much every computer, phone and language relies on this database for timezone information.
Who maintains ffmpeg?
