6 ms·
What are some examples of this?
by ericjang 6y ago
What are some examples of this?
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoProbably things like YACC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc
- setpatchaddress 6y agoWhy? There have been alternative implementations since forever.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoWell the classic example was openssl, although that has thankfully been improved substantially ever since Heartbleed.
- rectang 6y agoHeartbleed was really the watershed moment. "Tech giants, chastened by Heartbleed, finally agree to fund OpenSSL" (2014): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-giants-chastened-by-heartbleed-finally-agree-to-fund-openssl/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-...
- ipnon 6y agohttp://left-pad.io/ http://left-pad.io/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- outworlder 6y agocurl ? :)
- kornish 6y agoThe author of curl has a funny blog post about how random people will sometimes find the curl license in the software of their everyday things (like a Toyota Corolla) and reach out to him asking for help with their things. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/
- freen 6y agoThe timezone database. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database
- azernik 6y agoICANN has been managing/backing it since 2011 (http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-October/008090.html http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-October/008090.html), when the maintainers were sued by some random astrology company.
- KnightHawk3 6y agolibinput https://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/10/libinputs-bus-factor-is-1.html https://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/10/libinputs-bus-factor-is-1...
- sinfjotli 6y agoNot the most recent article (2016), so things might have changed since then: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-out-for-ntp.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-ou...
- jsharkey 6y agodnsmasq comes to mind, it runs on quite a few embedded routers. Here's an interview with the author: https://joshuakugler.com/an-interview-with-simon-kelley-the-author-of-dnsmasq.html https://joshuakugler.com/an-interview-with-simon-kelley-the-...
- banana_giraffe 6y agoSQLite feels like this to me. It's more than one person, and it's not thankless work (at least, I hope). But still it is critical to a surprising amount of technology, and maintained by a very few people.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 6y agoSQLite is supported by commercial arrangements (https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html) and used by giant corporations all around the world, quite a different story.
- outworlder 6y agoAnd, at the same time, it's a very underused piece of tech Every time you think you need a custom file format for a given piece of software... you most likely don't. Just use SQLite. You can use the standard OS file Open/Save dialog box and users will never know the difference. Yes, that means you now have to write SQL statements to manipulate your data. But that also means that you can get lots of complicated data structures on disk and can manipulate them easily, even outside your own software - just fire up the sqlite CLI and point to your file. There are GUIs as well. Things like UNDO/REDO can also be had almost trivially (see https://www.sqlite.org/undoredo.html https://www.sqlite.org/undoredo.html) Sometimes this also means you don't need an external RDBMS even for web apps. I've seen so many apps which co-locate a small database in the same box that might as well have been a single sqlite file. I'm actually maintaining one right now that, although relatively important, will only ever be a single box. But sqlite wasn't 'enterprisey' enough, had to use PG. For a couple of tables. https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html Subscribe for my next rant on another underused piece of tech... Lua :)
- nneonneo 6y agosqlite3 is now very heavily used in the Apple ecosystem - all of Core Data is built on it, and many of Apple’s own apps use it to store all kinds of data. It’s a godsend for tinkerers like me too - just point the SQLite CLI at one of the internal DBs (like the Photos database) and all sorts of cool stuff comes spilling out. For on-disk document storage I think Apple mostly uses a mix of plain folders with magic extensions (“packages”) and ZIP files nowadays, although there are definitely a lot of exceptions. SQLite isn’t that great for binary blob storage (relatively speaking) so a folder structure is still more useful there, IMO.
- exhaze 6y agoThe most newsworthy one in the last year was core js - a JS poly fill library that most other big npm libraries are built on top of. The maintainer is some random guy from a remote part of Russia. About half a year ago, he was sentenced to a prison sentence . He was the sole maintainer of the project (I guess he refused to give other people write access). I’m not sure if any of its dependent projects have done anything about forking the project, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most just ignore it until it causes some hilarious left-padpocalyse.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> The most newsworthy one in the last year was core js - a JS poly fill library that most other big npm libraries are built on top of. The maintainer is some random guy from a remote part of Russia. About half a year ago, he was sentenced to a prison sentence . He was the sole maintainer of the project (I guess he refused to give other people write access). Core-js most recent commit was 4 days ago, and the repo owner stopped both committing and being the sole committer about 7 months ago with no extended interruption in activity (and there've been several patch releases since), so it looks like whatever happened was dealt with quickly.
- greencar 6y agoSource? I love npm stories like this and couldn't find it on the first page of google.
- saagarjha 6y agohttps://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548#issuecomment-494112872 https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548#issuecomment-...
- antongribok 6y agoNTP
- woogley 6y agoNot exactly a lone developer, but ffmpeg
- hnick 6y agoNTP basically was but I think things might have changed since? https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-out-for-ntp.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-ou...
- becauseiam 6y agontpd is now looked after by the Network Time Foundation, but more importantly many distributions use other implementations of the protocol like chronyd.
- iou 6y agohttps://twitter.com/goldbe/status/1295528530646892545?s=20 https://twitter.com/goldbe/status/1295528530646892545?s=20
- zelly 6y agoPGP https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encrypti...
- rakoo 6y agoOpenSSL is notoriously in this situation: maintained by a few guys for whom it isn't even a full-time job, so they can't really do the proper work of trimming the fat that's all there GnuPG is also maintained mostly by the same original guy, who was going broke a few years back so there was a chance he couldn't work on it anymore (https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encrypti...). Fortunately the community came to help and now the future of GPG is a little bit more secure It's not really the same but ssh is literally everywhere. Absolutely none of our sysadmin work would be possible without it, and yet very few of us actually give back to the OpenBSD foundation. If we all gave a penny every time we installed it every year, the foundation would reach its annual goal (https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2019.html https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2019.html) but we obviously don't, so they still need to ask for money Also not specifically in this way but pretty much anything that Daniel J. Bernstein does is so good that it becomes a crypto standard. It's kinda ok because the software he does are "finished" in the sense that no new features are neither needed nor wanted, and his work is more about the primitives than the actual libraries. Still, there's a lot of the upcoming standards that all depend on what this single guy did.
- kepler1 6y agoAnd yet they had to divert resources to entertain the team member who thought it was a good use of everyone's time to change/replace all "whitelist" and "master" terms to non-offensive terminology.
- jhardy54 6y agoCool post history. Please find a healthier outlet for your ideology.
- padmadevu 6y agoNIce Article!!! Thank you for providing such a great help !!! https://devu.in/devops-certification-training-in-bangalore/ https://devu.in/devops-certification-training-in-bangalore/
- mdoms 6y agoJSON.net in .NET land was this type of dependency for many years. It was maintained largely by a single founding developer in New Zealand, eventually even becoming a core dependency of ASP.NET itself. He got hired by MS eventually but it must have been close to a decade of this library being a dep of nearly every .NET web project under James' stewardship.
- 2bitencryption 6y agonowadays if you fuzz any ASP.NET site hard enough, eventually you are going to encounter a Newtonsoft stacktrace.
- im_dario 6y agoMy library, mergo [0], is used in Docker, Kubernetes, and other big projects that are the core of what we know as the cloud. At some point, my library caused a bug or two in Docker, impacting how config was loaded. 0: https://github.com/imdario/mergo https://github.com/imdario/mergo
- fanf2 6y agodnsmasq (Simon Kelley) bash (Chet Ramey)
- saagarjha 6y agoChet also does Readline.