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.
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 ☺️
Holy shit Rockbox was amazing. I might still be subscribed to the mailing list. I used that on a few different MP3 players as a kid. I had no idea. Fuck I am old.
Edit: For a list of what he has worked on - https://daniel.haxx.se/opensource.html
“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.
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 heard about that last one on a podcast and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post. Genuinely interesting story (if you’re into that sort of thing). The pod was saying how it’s both a flaw of open source that it could happen that way and an advantage because it was discoverable due to the fact that the code is open source.
Which podcast? Sounds like something I’d be interested in listening to
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
- runke - jerk off
- runker - jerking off
- runket - jerked off
Etc…
We all needed to know this, especially on a day like today. Thank you 🥹
“especially today”? What’s today? Can you elaborate?
Oh, I would never provide context on something like that.
Hi, I’m a Finn. We also have a variation of this.
Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter sounds like someone did it on purpose.
There’s a lot of that in the software world. I’m thinking of gimp.
Graphics Image Manipulation Program, yeah right
also the swedish meme subreddit is called r/unket
The
core-jsstory 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.I had seen the hate before and foolishly just assumed he was deserving of it. Its a horrible situation he’s in and he is being cast in a bad light because he reached out for help.
It’s especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He’s been taken advantage of by the whole world.
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here’s the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
The curl author writes a lot about his struggles, but he’s also employed to maintain curl, so not really a good example
deleted by creator
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.
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”.
It would make sooo much more sense for the ISO to set something up, and make governments each responsible for keeping it updated, since they’re the ones doing the changing.
Require all participants to amend their law/regulations, so there’s a note to prompt whoever is in power and changes it next.
I’m sure some places would still neglect to do it… Haha
It has organizational support from ICANN, so it’s not done in total isolation.
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?
A few libraries come to mind immediately: fftw (I think the most widely used fft library) or GMP (I think the most used multi precision library).
TIL Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are half guys.
They prefer to be called Hobbits.
runk is the thomas ladder of our era
I agree
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
Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!
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.
It’s also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.
I don’t know, rm being short for “remove” is very verbaceous.
Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "
Ah, pshaw, I don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s such a thing as “not a word.” Why bother having a system of root words, prefixes and suffixes if we’re not allowed to use that system to build the words we need? Especially for the fun of it. Verbaceous is adjectivacular.
Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
And their website is quirky
As is their code of ethics.
Have something to share?
Lmao yo wtf
Jesus Christ
I see you like the first rule.
SQLite devs are trolls to their suppliers that’s great 😂
They said they’re quite serious about it, actually. While it’s quirky, I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s… weirdly charming? I’d never use anything like it, but it’s fun to see something different amidst a world of copy-pasted contributor covenants.
I mean, to make such a point that the only point of the page was simply to satisfy a requirement of someone else’s volition and yet creating that page and apparently saying what you’re saying—seems like there’s something misaligning here :P
Also I no doubt that they hate people who talk too much and hate making jokes — there’s some seriously unserious stuff inside of the rules they posted. They are serious folks who have zero tolerance for laughter apparently :D
My headcanon is they’re a bunch of people who have a super religious supplier with strict checkbox rules and they are fucking with them.
Huh… My dad is a software engineer and his name is Ronald. He also secured several software patents when he worked for a big chip wafer manufacturer. He might actually be the Ronald in this meme… 🤔
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.
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
https://bagder.github.io/emails/ has the email collection.
Here’s an example from NASA
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.
