7 ms·

Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?

106 points by udev4096 2y ago

I can think of sudo (https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/graphs/contributors) which is maintained by just one person and is being used by every major linux distribution

jamiehewitt 2y ago
Mocha js testing framework is widely used and maintained by a small team https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/5027 https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/5027
robthebrew 2y ago
curl
shprd 2y ago
- curl: Daniel Stenberg et al. - https://github.com/orgs/curl/people https://github.com/orgs/curl/people - Lua (programming language): team of 3 - https://www.lua.org/authors.html https://www.lua.org/authors.html - openssl: 15 people - https://github.com/orgs/openssl/people https://github.com/orgs/openssl/people maybe also: sqlite, vim, nginx, redis
- rollcat 2y ago
  > maybe also: sqlite [...] SQLite won't accept contributions from outside the core team; joining the core team is an involved process, as they're taking extreme measures to ensure it will continue to be recognised as a work in public domain in as many jurisdictions as humanly possible. You can still support the project by paying them for their work (or by getting your employer to do so): https://www.sqlite.org/prosupport.html https://www.sqlite.org/prosupport.html
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    My understanding was that you could absolutely contribute without joining the core team, but you do need to file some paperwork to ensure that code can remain in the public domain. The need for the legal paperwork is that public domain is not a thing in multiple countries.
    - rollcat 2y ago
      The justification and legal requirements are pretty clearly explained: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html TL;DR: they have a company that legally employs every single co-author, to be able to sell you a Warranty of Title, just in case your company/jurisdiction/etc has a problem with public domain.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  15 people is not "a few", it's a substantial group. How many maintainers for the other ones you mentioned?
- pledg 2y ago
  There's 724 people listed as contributors on the redis GitHub.
  - shprd 2y ago
    Right, but the question is concerned with the number of maintainers. The people who play some role, not just passing by. Redis team consists of 8 people: https://github.com/orgs/redis/people https://github.com/orgs/redis/people
lipitic 2y ago
husky (git hooks) https://github.com/typicode/husky https://github.com/typicode/husky
suman99pro 2y ago
Linux Kernel
- 201984 2y ago
  Could not be further from the truth. 1900+ people contributed to the latest release. https://lwn.net/Articles/981559/ https://lwn.net/Articles/981559/
- v3ss0n 2y ago
  There are more commiters than maintainers can control quality.
  - bubblesnort 2y ago
    There are also very few testers of stable release candidates for such a big project.
nolok 2y ago
If you really want to dwelve into this, while the applications have plenty of cases let's not forget the underlying libraries that "everyone" depends on.
jacooper 2y ago
Imagemagick
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
passwordoops 2y ago
Just curious what arrangement theses people have. -do their employers recognize their effort and give hours to the side projects? -they mostly contractors so can arrange their time accordingly? -donations? -or is it mostly a hobby done out of passion?
- withinboredom 2y ago
  I don't have something nearly as popular as these other projects; but if you have a popular project, a potential employer might offer work hours for it to get you as an employee. Further, as a contributor of some now popular projects with one other maintainer, I can say that I mostly do it for fun. My current employer gives zero-fucks about it but if a new employer were to use it to woo me away, I would jump in a heartbeat.
  - mirekrusin 2y ago
    Copyright on your contributions may belong to employer during employment period in most jurisdictions.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Maybe but you may have permissions to make it open source.
    - withinboredom 2y ago
      My employment contract specifically allows me to keep any rights that I do on my own time and equipment that doesn't compete in certain areas -- and enumerates those industries.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  You forgot an important option: No payment, not a hobby, very little passion, doing it because the public needs it. (And possibly got started because, damn it, somebody had to write it / take over maintenance.)
skyfantom 2y ago
brew
- sneak 2y ago
  The brew formulae are maintained by many people, and the “brew” command line tool has dozens of contributors with >100 commits.
- latexr 2y ago
  Homebrew has a healthy amount of maintainers. Some people leave as priorities change but others join. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#who-we-are https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#who-we-are
teeceepee 2y ago
Time Zone Database https://github.com/eggert/tz/graphs/contributors https://github.com/eggert/tz/graphs/contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database
- fouronnes3 2y ago
  This is a good answer. Especially in the light of the 2021 drama and the maintainer's benevolent dictator status. What happens when the community disagrees with a benevolent dictator's decision? https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/ https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/
  - koliber 2y ago
    A revolution
  - blueflow 2y ago
    Same as with glibc and Ullrich Drepper.
  - squigz 2y ago
    > What happens when the community disagrees with a benevolent dictator's decision? They discuss it, try to come to a compromise, and if all else fails, fork it. Maybe it's not ideal, but then again, people seem to have a big problem when you have 'boards' running these projects too, so...
    - dagelf 2y ago
      All hail the actual time lord
bueny 2y ago
FastAPI
cba85 2y ago
Php
- ale42 2y ago
  I'm surprised to hear this, any more info?
  - 0x073 2y ago
    Its wrong, or at least not my definition of few people. https://thephp.foundation/structure/ https://thephp.foundation/structure/ "Core Developers The PHP Foundation contracts 10 full-time and part-time engineers to maintain and develop the PHP language."
    - withinboredom 2y ago
      Not to mention all the volunteers.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      There are many, people doing (good, valuable) things on PHP, however active people with deep understanding of the engine can be counted on less than a hand. (I contributed some small things to the engine and other parts in the past)
      - kingofthehill98 2y ago
        One of those people is Nikita Popov (nikic). PHP core development took a hard hit when he left to work on other projects at JetBrains.
bazzargh 2y ago
bash and readline - Chet Ramey. Both originally by Brian Fox https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html maybe less of a bus factor now with OSH approaching feature/speed parity and having more maintainers https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/
- Fnoord 2y ago
  For a moment I thought you meant open source hardware. Then came my disappointment.
alexk6 2y ago
Byte Buddy - runtime code generation for the Java virtual machine - https://github.com/raphw/byte-buddy https://github.com/raphw/byte-buddy > It is stable and in use by distinguished frameworks and tools such as Mockito, Hibernate , Jackson, Google's Bazel build system and many others. Byte Buddy is also used by a large number of commercial products to great result. It is currently downloaded over 75 million times a year.
michaelt 2y ago
In this thread: Wildly different definitions of what "widely used" means :) Did you know tools like uname [1] and cat [2] in GNU coreutils have essentially only had two contributors in the past decade? [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=history;f=src/uname.c;h=1ddaa34a2f1c76c94dcef1827e09b54688949343;hb=master http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor... [2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=history;f=src/cat.c;h=c7bb7e132c36c0fc800973a0eb00ceea12bcb8a6;hb=master http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor...
- delusional 2y ago
  And most of what happens in those utilities is updating the copyright year numbers.
  - latexr 2y ago
    Which seems wholly unnecessary. The way I understand it, having only the starting year is sufficient.
    - regularfry 2y ago
      Absent any changes in a year, the copyright year shouldn't be updated. Otherwise what you're claiming is that the copyright term starts from a date after creation of the content, so it's getting artificially extended.
      - dartos 2y ago
        Every time you change code and commit it, is it not a new program? New editions of books have new copyright years, since they’re new books. Same thing with code
        regularfry 2y ago
        That's why my first word was "absent".
mih 2y ago
SQLite - https://www.sqlite.org/draft/crew.html https://www.sqlite.org/draft/crew.html
- chubot 2y ago
  Looks like this is the non-draft URL - https://www.sqlite.org/crew.html https://www.sqlite.org/crew.html
etewiah 2y ago
dokku
thibaut_barrere 2y ago
Most of the projects I am aware of :-)
ratmice 2y ago
It would probably be easier to enumerate the small number of projects which have a larger amount of maintainers. I think the vast majority only have a few maintainers.
bubblesnort 2y ago
Expat LibreSSL Linux-PAM OpenSSH re2c tzdata zlib Those are just the ones that came to mind.
- rollcat 2y ago
  Good list. Sometimes the easiest way to contribute is to just donate some money, so that the existing maintainers can continue to focus on their work. OpenBSD is the "mothership" project for both OpenSSH and LibreSSL: https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html Unfortunately I couldn't find any information on how to donate to these projects: - https://re2c.org https://re2c.org - https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat - https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam - https://zlib.net https://zlib.net tzdata is actually maintained by IANA: - https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    I didn't realize the IANA contributed debian packages and rpms. /s They maintain the list, but someone has to package it.
    - rollcat 2y ago
      Please link on how to contribute to Debian then: https://www.debian.org/devel/join/ https://www.debian.org/devel/join/
KeplerBoy 2y ago
Liblzma rather infamously.
2d8a875f-39a2-4 2y ago
All of them!
Karliss 2y ago
It almost feels like it's easier to list which fundamental projects have more than one active maintainer. Many of the core library and tools are mostly finished and have very little yearly activity. How many maintainers does a project have if the last activity was one or two commits made or maybe just merged by one maintainer 3 years ago, and few more 5 years ago. Does it count as 2 maintainers, 1 maintainer, 0 maintainers? Does the "maintainer" from 5 years ago still have commit permission and how likely are they to get involved if some merge requests show up. Even for active projects it's very common for 90% of work being done by one main maintainer.
- wiercin 2y ago
  Looking at the example of sudo it seems there are still plenty of regular and recent commits. https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commits/main/ https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commits/main/
- keepamovin 2y ago
  > Many of the core library and tools are mostly finished and have very little yearly activity Yeah. The ad-hoc, de-facto "Standard Library" for JavaScript, the "web", and fullstack web apps. OSS ecosystem is sometimes so very "Down and out in the magic Kingdom" adhocracy like. Shame we haven't got the rest of the Bitchun' society's perks. :) hahaha!
bux93 2y ago
Note that the situation will not be much better for closed sourced projects. Sure, your vendor will probably fix bugs, but it may take some time until they find someone who has any knowledge of that codebase and survived last week's reshuffle, the re-org in spring and last year's buyout.
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  I don't know that it is better for closed source projects, but regardless open source has an escape hatch closed source doesn't. If something goes wrong, you can maintain it yourself, or fork it. I've done it myself. That one property along is enough if you want longevity, open source is always a safer bet than closed source. In my case, I guess it extended the projects life by another 20 years.
lynx23 2y ago
bash
_tk_ 2y ago
There's been some research into the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462_What_is_the_Truck_Factor_of_popular_GitHub_applications_A_first_assessment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462_What_is_t...
_micheee 2y ago
Not only software but also infrastructure & protocols: N.T.P.: — https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thor... I found it quite a good read!
7222aafdcf68cfe 2y ago
Jia Tan is looking for a new project ?
chpatrick 2y ago
Nice try Jia Tan!
gdevenyi 2y ago
This has been observed before https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
rurban 2y ago
All the better ones. The more maintainers, the quality goes down. Down to total destruction
gburiola 2y ago
Kapitan https://github.com/kapicorp/kapitan https://github.com/kapicorp/kapitan
fanf2 2y ago
PCRE https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/issues/426 https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/issues/426
eqvinox 2y ago
flex & bison. Especially flex seems close to unmaintained.
tw1984 2y ago
google's leveldb
blueflow 2y ago
zlib: Mark Adler ncurses/xterm: Thomas Dickey
udev4096 2y ago
e2fsprogs (https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs) is a widely-used utility suite for creating, maintaining, and repairing ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems
Retr0id 2y ago
In some sense, the ubiquitous "unzip" has 0 maintainers. Per the upstream, https://infozip.sourceforge.net/ https://infozip.sourceforge.net/, "UnZip 6.0 was released on 29 April 2009". But there are not truly 0 maintainers, because distros maintain their own patchsets, for example: https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unzip/log/ https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unzip/log/ (By the way, unzip is arguably not feature complete. The ZIP spec has been updated multiple times since 2009, with the notable addition of the Zstandard compression method, among other things https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT)
- dagelf 2y ago
  zstd is not zip and pkware has long been irrelevant
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    DEFLATE isn't zip either, what's your point?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mianos 2y ago
dnsmasq. Running on billions of of devices (including Android), one guy (Simon Kelley).
willm 2y ago
Rich. 197 million downloads a month. There are two maintainers.
chirag7004 2y ago
see the success of laravel
chirag7004 2y ago
see the success of laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel
mdtrooper 2y ago
People used to fight for upstream factories to return the water they used clean to the river. It was an ecologist's fight. Now corporations do projects with 5 or more zeroes in budget and a high percentage of the code is free software or open source. And they give 0 back to free or open projects that they parasite. I wrote an article years ago in my blog (in Spanish, sorry), "Free software has failed": https://tomatesasesinos.com/2019/07/11/el-software-libre-ha-fracasado/ https://tomatesasesinos.com/2019/07/11/el-software-libre-ha-...
- ericyd 2y ago
  I think this belongs under "Show HN: My Tangentially Related Thoughts"
brandelune 2y ago
OmegaT is widely used in the professional translation world and maintained by 1 person with a very few active contributors (except for localizers). https://omegat.org https://omegat.org
bestest 2y ago
Coolify! https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Mainan_Tagonist 2y ago
VLC - VideoLan https://github.com/orgs/videolan/people https://github.com/orgs/videolan/people As i recollect, GnuPG was also a one man band for some time.
devinprater 2y ago
Edit: I missed the "widely used" part. [Orca](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca). Very important for blind Linux desktop users. If you like frameworks more, [ATSPI](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core), or [AccessKit](https://accesskit.dev/ https://accesskit.dev/) may fit you more. Or, if you like contributing others' apps, take a look at how you could make them more accessible, with these [Tips for application developers](https://github.com/GNOME/orca/blob/main/README-APPLICATION-DEVELOPERS.md https://github.com/GNOME/orca/blob/main/README-APPLICATION-D...).
dearroy 2y ago
Not very typical "widely used" project but recently surpassed 100k+ installs with two people working on it part-time. https://github.com/heyform/heyform https://github.com/heyform/heyform
jringo_- 2y ago
People ask this question a lot in academia. The system just about incentivizes creating dupliware and/or abandonware that is critical to a domain, field, or niche, so there is tons of it (there is also A LOT of very good stable software, but ignoring this for now). This makes it very difficult for new parties to find open source software they can rely on, for funders to determine what software to support, for institutions to track their contributions, etc. I am working on a project solving for this specific question (and many others), across the open source and open science ecosystems, starting with open source research software but ultimately intends to touch the whole space. Among other things, we want to take continuous measurements of the health of open source projects, the use of open source projects, the perception of open source projects, the "impact of open source projects", and the needs of open source projects. We are combining data collection with stigmergic markers and eventual webs of trust. It is incubated by NumFOCUS, and includes collaborations from across the academic industry. Bringing it here for your thoughts. The project is called "The Map of Open Source Science" (MOSS) and is built on the "Simply Omniscient Layer" (SOL). It is essentially an omniscient open permissionless graph database of the digital knowledge and research ecosystems, as well as a corresponding visualization (eventually people will be able to build their own visualizations interfacing with SOL). Very recent presentation at PyData Vermont: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c51njj9JPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c51njj9JPs Recentish update: https://www.opensource.science/updates/the-map-of-open-source-science-now-in-neo4j-now-in-3d https://www.opensource.science/updates/the-map-of-open-sourc... Landing page for the program: https://opensource.science https://opensource.science From our site: "MOSS is a comprehensive, composable, interactive map of the digital knowledge and research ecosystems. We identify connections between open source research software projects, research papers, organizations, patents, datasets, funding pathways, AI models and applications, and the people who drive it all. The MOSS proof of concept so far demonstrates nine use-cases: Identify relevant tools for your research Showcase the impact and connections of the people that make and maintain open source research tools Showcase the impact and connections of the organizations that build, support, and fund development of open source research tools Showcase the impact and connections of open source research tools Identify gaps in open source research tooling Navigate repetition of open source research tool features Identify, prevent, and reinvigorate abandoned open source research tools Streamline the grant submission and review process Navigate security flaw identification - who to contact, what downstream tools are effected, what alternative tools exist"
sukunrt 2y ago
quic-go: https://github.com/quic-go/quic-go/ https://github.com/quic-go/quic-go/
daoistmonk 2y ago
wireguard [1] https://www.wireguard.com/repositories/ https://www.wireguard.com/repositories/
constantinum 2y ago
GnuPG and Werner Koch comes to mind, there was this HN thread 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 Also Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg and his projects comes to mind. I might be wrong too.
dagelf 2y ago
Perfect software doesn't need to be maintained. TM
jviotti 2y ago
JSON Schema is the industry standard schema language for JSON, used by big players like OpenAPI and by an insanely high number of APIs and products out there. The TSC core team stays at ~6 people (I'm one of them)
skyzyx 2y ago
Ones that are highly complex but poorly documented.

106 points by udev4096 2y ago

I can think of sudo (https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/graphs/contributors) which is maintained by just one person and is being used by every major linux distribution

jamiehewitt 2y ago

Mocha js testing framework is widely used and maintained by a small team https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/5027 https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/5027

robthebrew 2y ago

curl

shprd 2y ago

- curl: Daniel Stenberg et al. - https://github.com/orgs/curl/people https://github.com/orgs/curl/people - Lua (programming language): team of 3 - https://www.lua.org/authors.html https://www.lua.org/authors.html - openssl: 15 people - https://github.com/orgs/openssl/people https://github.com/orgs/openssl/people maybe also: sqlite, vim, nginx, redis

rollcat 2y ago
> maybe also: sqlite [...] SQLite won't accept contributions from outside the core team; joining the core team is an involved process, as they're taking extreme measures to ensure it will continue to be recognised as a work in public domain in as many jurisdictions as humanly possible. You can still support the project by paying them for their work (or by getting your employer to do so): https://www.sqlite.org/prosupport.html https://www.sqlite.org/prosupport.html
- mrweasel 2y ago
  My understanding was that you could absolutely contribute without joining the core team, but you do need to file some paperwork to ensure that code can remain in the public domain. The need for the legal paperwork is that public domain is not a thing in multiple countries.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    The justification and legal requirements are pretty clearly explained: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html TL;DR: they have a company that legally employs every single co-author, to be able to sell you a Warranty of Title, just in case your company/jurisdiction/etc has a problem with public domain.
einpoklum 2y ago
15 people is not "a few", it's a substantial group. How many maintainers for the other ones you mentioned?
pledg 2y ago
There's 724 people listed as contributors on the redis GitHub.
- shprd 2y ago
  Right, but the question is concerned with the number of maintainers. The people who play some role, not just passing by. Redis team consists of 8 people: https://github.com/orgs/redis/people https://github.com/orgs/redis/people

lipitic 2y ago

husky (git hooks) https://github.com/typicode/husky https://github.com/typicode/husky

suman99pro 2y ago

Linux Kernel

201984 2y ago
Could not be further from the truth. 1900+ people contributed to the latest release. https://lwn.net/Articles/981559/ https://lwn.net/Articles/981559/
v3ss0n 2y ago
There are more commiters than maintainers can control quality.
- bubblesnort 2y ago
  There are also very few testers of stable release candidates for such a big project.

nolok 2y ago

If you really want to dwelve into this, while the applications have plenty of cases let's not forget the underlying libraries that "everyone" depends on.

jacooper 2y ago

Imagemagick

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

passwordoops 2y ago

Just curious what arrangement theses people have. -do their employers recognize their effort and give hours to the side projects? -they mostly contractors so can arrange their time accordingly? -donations? -or is it mostly a hobby done out of passion?

withinboredom 2y ago
I don't have something nearly as popular as these other projects; but if you have a popular project, a potential employer might offer work hours for it to get you as an employee. Further, as a contributor of some now popular projects with one other maintainer, I can say that I mostly do it for fun. My current employer gives zero-fucks about it but if a new employer were to use it to woo me away, I would jump in a heartbeat.
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  Copyright on your contributions may belong to employer during employment period in most jurisdictions.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Maybe but you may have permissions to make it open source.
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    My employment contract specifically allows me to keep any rights that I do on my own time and equipment that doesn't compete in certain areas -- and enumerates those industries.
einpoklum 2y ago
You forgot an important option: No payment, not a hobby, very little passion, doing it because the public needs it. (And possibly got started because, damn it, somebody had to write it / take over maintenance.)

skyfantom 2y ago

brew

sneak 2y ago
The brew formulae are maintained by many people, and the “brew” command line tool has dozens of contributors with >100 commits.
latexr 2y ago
Homebrew has a healthy amount of maintainers. Some people leave as priorities change but others join. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#who-we-are https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#who-we-are

teeceepee 2y ago

Time Zone Database https://github.com/eggert/tz/graphs/contributors https://github.com/eggert/tz/graphs/contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

fouronnes3 2y ago
This is a good answer. Especially in the light of the 2021 drama and the maintainer's benevolent dictator status. What happens when the community disagrees with a benevolent dictator's decision? https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/ https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/
- koliber 2y ago
  A revolution
- blueflow 2y ago
  Same as with glibc and Ullrich Drepper.
- squigz 2y ago
  > What happens when the community disagrees with a benevolent dictator's decision? They discuss it, try to come to a compromise, and if all else fails, fork it. Maybe it's not ideal, but then again, people seem to have a big problem when you have 'boards' running these projects too, so...
  - dagelf 2y ago
    All hail the actual time lord

bueny 2y ago

FastAPI

cba85 2y ago

Php

ale42 2y ago
I'm surprised to hear this, any more info?
- 0x073 2y ago
  Its wrong, or at least not my definition of few people. https://thephp.foundation/structure/ https://thephp.foundation/structure/ "Core Developers The PHP Foundation contracts 10 full-time and part-time engineers to maintain and develop the PHP language."
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    Not to mention all the volunteers.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    There are many, people doing (good, valuable) things on PHP, however active people with deep understanding of the engine can be counted on less than a hand. (I contributed some small things to the engine and other parts in the past)
    - kingofthehill98 2y ago
      One of those people is Nikita Popov (nikic). PHP core development took a hard hit when he left to work on other projects at JetBrains.

bazzargh 2y ago

bash and readline - Chet Ramey. Both originally by Brian Fox https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html maybe less of a bus factor now with OSH approaching feature/speed parity and having more maintainers https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/

Fnoord 2y ago
For a moment I thought you meant open source hardware. Then came my disappointment.

alexk6 2y ago

Byte Buddy - runtime code generation for the Java virtual machine - https://github.com/raphw/byte-buddy https://github.com/raphw/byte-buddy > It is stable and in use by distinguished frameworks and tools such as Mockito, Hibernate , Jackson, Google's Bazel build system and many others. Byte Buddy is also used by a large number of commercial products to great result. It is currently downloaded over 75 million times a year.

michaelt 2y ago

In this thread: Wildly different definitions of what "widely used" means :) Did you know tools like uname [1] and cat [2] in GNU coreutils have essentially only had two contributors in the past decade? [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=history;f=src/uname.c;h=1ddaa34a2f1c76c94dcef1827e09b54688949343;hb=master http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor... [2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=history;f=src/cat.c;h=c7bb7e132c36c0fc800973a0eb00ceea12bcb8a6;hb=master http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor...

delusional 2y ago
And most of what happens in those utilities is updating the copyright year numbers.
- latexr 2y ago
  Which seems wholly unnecessary. The way I understand it, having only the starting year is sufficient.
  - regularfry 2y ago
    Absent any changes in a year, the copyright year shouldn't be updated. Otherwise what you're claiming is that the copyright term starts from a date after creation of the content, so it's getting artificially extended.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Every time you change code and commit it, is it not a new program? New editions of books have new copyright years, since they’re new books. Same thing with code
      - regularfry 2y ago
        That's why my first word was "absent".

mih 2y ago

SQLite - https://www.sqlite.org/draft/crew.html https://www.sqlite.org/draft/crew.html

chubot 2y ago
Looks like this is the non-draft URL - https://www.sqlite.org/crew.html https://www.sqlite.org/crew.html

etewiah 2y ago

dokku

thibaut_barrere 2y ago

Most of the projects I am aware of :-)

ratmice 2y ago

It would probably be easier to enumerate the small number of projects which have a larger amount of maintainers. I think the vast majority only have a few maintainers.

bubblesnort 2y ago

Expat LibreSSL Linux-PAM OpenSSH re2c tzdata zlib Those are just the ones that came to mind.

rollcat 2y ago
Good list. Sometimes the easiest way to contribute is to just donate some money, so that the existing maintainers can continue to focus on their work. OpenBSD is the "mothership" project for both OpenSSH and LibreSSL: https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html Unfortunately I couldn't find any information on how to donate to these projects: - https://re2c.org https://re2c.org - https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat - https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam - https://zlib.net https://zlib.net tzdata is actually maintained by IANA: - https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
- withinboredom 2y ago
  I didn't realize the IANA contributed debian packages and rpms. /s They maintain the list, but someone has to package it.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    Please link on how to contribute to Debian then: https://www.debian.org/devel/join/ https://www.debian.org/devel/join/

KeplerBoy 2y ago

Liblzma rather infamously.

2d8a875f-39a2-4 2y ago

All of them!

Karliss 2y ago

It almost feels like it's easier to list which fundamental projects have more than one active maintainer. Many of the core library and tools are mostly finished and have very little yearly activity. How many maintainers does a project have if the last activity was one or two commits made or maybe just merged by one maintainer 3 years ago, and few more 5 years ago. Does it count as 2 maintainers, 1 maintainer, 0 maintainers? Does the "maintainer" from 5 years ago still have commit permission and how likely are they to get involved if some merge requests show up. Even for active projects it's very common for 90% of work being done by one main maintainer.

wiercin 2y ago
Looking at the example of sudo it seems there are still plenty of regular and recent commits. https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commits/main/ https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commits/main/
keepamovin 2y ago
> Many of the core library and tools are mostly finished and have very little yearly activity Yeah. The ad-hoc, de-facto "Standard Library" for JavaScript, the "web", and fullstack web apps. OSS ecosystem is sometimes so very "Down and out in the magic Kingdom" adhocracy like. Shame we haven't got the rest of the Bitchun' society's perks. :) hahaha!

bux93 2y ago

Note that the situation will not be much better for closed sourced projects. Sure, your vendor will probably fix bugs, but it may take some time until they find someone who has any knowledge of that codebase and survived last week's reshuffle, the re-org in spring and last year's buyout.

rstuart4133 2y ago
I don't know that it is better for closed source projects, but regardless open source has an escape hatch closed source doesn't. If something goes wrong, you can maintain it yourself, or fork it. I've done it myself. That one property along is enough if you want longevity, open source is always a safer bet than closed source. In my case, I guess it extended the projects life by another 20 years.

lynx23 2y ago

bash

_tk_ 2y ago

There's been some research into the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462_What_is_the_Truck_Factor_of_popular_GitHub_applications_A_first_assessment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462_What_is_t...

_micheee 2y ago

Not only software but also infrastructure & protocols: N.T.P.: — https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thor... I found it quite a good read!

7222aafdcf68cfe 2y ago

Jia Tan is looking for a new project ?

chpatrick 2y ago

Nice try Jia Tan!

gdevenyi 2y ago

This has been observed before https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

rurban 2y ago

All the better ones. The more maintainers, the quality goes down. Down to total destruction

gburiola 2y ago

Kapitan https://github.com/kapicorp/kapitan https://github.com/kapicorp/kapitan

fanf2 2y ago

PCRE https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/issues/426 https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/issues/426

eqvinox 2y ago

flex & bison. Especially flex seems close to unmaintained.

tw1984 2y ago

google's leveldb

blueflow 2y ago

zlib: Mark Adler ncurses/xterm: Thomas Dickey

udev4096 2y ago

e2fsprogs (https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs) is a widely-used utility suite for creating, maintaining, and repairing ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems

Retr0id 2y ago

In some sense, the ubiquitous "unzip" has 0 maintainers. Per the upstream, https://infozip.sourceforge.net/ https://infozip.sourceforge.net/, "UnZip 6.0 was released on 29 April 2009". But there are not truly 0 maintainers, because distros maintain their own patchsets, for example: https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unzip/log/ https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unzip/log/ (By the way, unzip is arguably not feature complete. The ZIP spec has been updated multiple times since 2009, with the notable addition of the Zstandard compression method, among other things https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT)

dagelf 2y ago
zstd is not zip and pkware has long been irrelevant
- Retr0id 2y ago
  DEFLATE isn't zip either, what's your point?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mianos 2y ago

dnsmasq. Running on billions of of devices (including Android), one guy (Simon Kelley).

willm 2y ago

Rich. 197 million downloads a month. There are two maintainers.

chirag7004 2y ago

see the success of laravel

chirag7004 2y ago

see the success of laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel

mdtrooper 2y ago

People used to fight for upstream factories to return the water they used clean to the river. It was an ecologist's fight. Now corporations do projects with 5 or more zeroes in budget and a high percentage of the code is free software or open source. And they give 0 back to free or open projects that they parasite. I wrote an article years ago in my blog (in Spanish, sorry), "Free software has failed": https://tomatesasesinos.com/2019/07/11/el-software-libre-ha-fracasado/ https://tomatesasesinos.com/2019/07/11/el-software-libre-ha-...

ericyd 2y ago
I think this belongs under "Show HN: My Tangentially Related Thoughts"

brandelune 2y ago

OmegaT is widely used in the professional translation world and maintained by 1 person with a very few active contributors (except for localizers). https://omegat.org https://omegat.org

bestest 2y ago

Coolify! https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Mainan_Tagonist 2y ago

VLC - VideoLan https://github.com/orgs/videolan/people https://github.com/orgs/videolan/people As i recollect, GnuPG was also a one man band for some time.

devinprater 2y ago

Edit: I missed the "widely used" part. [Orca](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca). Very important for blind Linux desktop users. If you like frameworks more, [ATSPI](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core), or [AccessKit](https://accesskit.dev/ https://accesskit.dev/) may fit you more. Or, if you like contributing others' apps, take a look at how you could make them more accessible, with these [Tips for application developers](https://github.com/GNOME/orca/blob/main/README-APPLICATION-DEVELOPERS.md https://github.com/GNOME/orca/blob/main/README-APPLICATION-D...).

dearroy 2y ago

Not very typical "widely used" project but recently surpassed 100k+ installs with two people working on it part-time. https://github.com/heyform/heyform https://github.com/heyform/heyform

jringo_- 2y ago

People ask this question a lot in academia. The system just about incentivizes creating dupliware and/or abandonware that is critical to a domain, field, or niche, so there is tons of it (there is also A LOT of very good stable software, but ignoring this for now). This makes it very difficult for new parties to find open source software they can rely on, for funders to determine what software to support, for institutions to track their contributions, etc. I am working on a project solving for this specific question (and many others), across the open source and open science ecosystems, starting with open source research software but ultimately intends to touch the whole space. Among other things, we want to take continuous measurements of the health of open source projects, the use of open source projects, the perception of open source projects, the "impact of open source projects", and the needs of open source projects. We are combining data collection with stigmergic markers and eventual webs of trust. It is incubated by NumFOCUS, and includes collaborations from across the academic industry. Bringing it here for your thoughts. The project is called "The Map of Open Source Science" (MOSS) and is built on the "Simply Omniscient Layer" (SOL). It is essentially an omniscient open permissionless graph database of the digital knowledge and research ecosystems, as well as a corresponding visualization (eventually people will be able to build their own visualizations interfacing with SOL). Very recent presentation at PyData Vermont: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c51njj9JPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c51njj9JPs Recentish update: https://www.opensource.science/updates/the-map-of-open-source-science-now-in-neo4j-now-in-3d https://www.opensource.science/updates/the-map-of-open-sourc... Landing page for the program: https://opensource.science https://opensource.science From our site: "MOSS is a comprehensive, composable, interactive map of the digital knowledge and research ecosystems. We identify connections between open source research software projects, research papers, organizations, patents, datasets, funding pathways, AI models and applications, and the people who drive it all. The MOSS proof of concept so far demonstrates nine use-cases: Identify relevant tools for your research Showcase the impact and connections of the people that make and maintain open source research tools Showcase the impact and connections of the organizations that build, support, and fund development of open source research tools Showcase the impact and connections of open source research tools Identify gaps in open source research tooling Navigate repetition of open source research tool features Identify, prevent, and reinvigorate abandoned open source research tools Streamline the grant submission and review process Navigate security flaw identification - who to contact, what downstream tools are effected, what alternative tools exist"

sukunrt 2y ago

quic-go: https://github.com/quic-go/quic-go/ https://github.com/quic-go/quic-go/

daoistmonk 2y ago

wireguard [1] https://www.wireguard.com/repositories/ https://www.wireguard.com/repositories/

constantinum 2y ago

GnuPG and Werner Koch comes to mind, there was this HN thread 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 Also Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg and his projects comes to mind. I might be wrong too.

dagelf 2y ago

Perfect software doesn't need to be maintained. TM

jviotti 2y ago

JSON Schema is the industry standard schema language for JSON, used by big players like OpenAPI and by an insanely high number of APIs and products out there. The TSC core team stays at ~6 people (I'm one of them)

skyzyx 2y ago

Ones that are highly complex but poorly documented.