Real examples here?

megaman@discuss.tchncs.de to Programming@programming.dev – 1478 points –

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.

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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:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

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".

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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's also worth pointing out that this was sued in a copyright lawsuit some time ago. The wikipedia article mentions it, but here's the slashdot discussion if you want to feel like stepping into a time machine: https://m.slashdot.org/story/158778

It caused a momentary panic when everyone realized that this thing runs the system clocks for everything everywhere, and if it got taken down by a copyright suit it would be disastrous for, well, everybody.

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?

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.

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https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

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.

I mean, that could be the case, but for the record, they really seem like some seriously dedicated folks—a 1:590 ratio of code to tests! What is this, the Oracle test suite?—that is, dedicated in both in their work and their faith.

[...] according to the original author of SQLite and its main administrator, D. Richard Hipp, he received "100 per cent buy-in from all committers prior to publishing [the CoE]."

Hipp [...] defends the "Christian values" that the document represents and points out that SQLite source code has a "blessing" at the top of each file in place of a license and includes the Jesus-inspired phrase: "Find forgiveness for yourself while forgiving others."

"I could have edited the list down to just those aspects that seem relevant to coding," Hipp told us. "But that would put me in the position of editing and redacting Benedict of Nursia, as if I were wiser than he. [...] In the preface, I tried to make clear that the introspective aspects could be safely glossed over."

"Nobody is excluded from the SQLite community due to biological category or religious creed," he told us. "[...] The only way to get kicked out of the SQLite community is by shouting, flaming, and disrespectful behavior. In 18 years, only one person has ever been banned from the mailing list."

Source - The Register

I find it more likely that they're just religious. To each their own.

It looks pretty decent to me, at least on mobile. Definitely better than 95% of websites.

Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.

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 / etilqs fiasco with McAfee.

https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79

Here's an example from NASA

https://x.com/bagder/status/1379897937141063686?lang=en

I feel a bit split about this. Seems it is an actual law, and it kind of makes sense. You probably don't want random components from unknown people and places in your multi million dollar space equipment. But it feels rather arrogant to just demand such things.

Is NASA actually a customer? Did they pay for a license to use curl (genuine question - I'm not familiar enough with it to know if enterprises and organisations require a paid license)? Are they planning on becoming a paying customer? Do they make donations to the project? If not, it feels kind of rude to send a demand letter to the lead developer of a free piece of software straight up demanding a formal letter stating where the free software is being developed and maintained (for free), or if outside the USA, that the free software has been tested in the USA. Oh, and a bonus demand that such information be returned within 5 business days (naturally with an implied "or else", just to really make sure those pesky people maintaining open source software for free really get the memo)

In any case, why don't all their scary 3 letter spy agencies go and figure it out on behalf of NASA themselves? It's open source, they could just like, read the source, test the source, and audit the source themselves. Or fork it and make any modifications they'd like to ensure its safety

I don't blame the person sending the emails, obviously, they're just following orders, but the whole email reads as very entitled and arrogant, assuming NASA don't provide any compensation to the project and projects maintainers for their use of curl

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/12/17/curl-supports-nasa/

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/07/closing-the-nasa-loop/

Their process for validating software doesn't have a box for "open source", and basically assumes it's either purchased, or contracted. So someone in risk assessment just gets a list of software libraries and goes down it checking that they have the required forms.

As the referenced talk mentions, the people using the software understand that all the testing and everything is entirely on them, and that sending these messages is bothersome and unfair, and they're working on it. Unfortunately, NASA is also a massive government bureaucracy and so process changes are slow, at best.
The TLAs don't generally help NASA, and getting them involved would unfortunately only result in more messages being sent.

As for contributions, I think that turns into an even worse can of worms, since generally software developed by or for the US government isn't just open source, but public domain. I think you'd end up with a big mess of licensing horror if you tried to get money or official relationships involved. It's why sqlite is public domain, since it was developed at the behest of the US.

Mostly just context for what you said. NASA isn't being arrogant, they're being gigantic. Doing their due diligence in-house while another branch goes down a checklist, sees they don't have a form and pops of an email and embarrassing the hell out of the first group.

The time limit thing is weird, but it's a common practice in bureaucracies, public or private. You stick a timeline on the request to convey your level of urgency and the establish some manner of timeline for the other person to work with. Read the line again, but extremely literally: "we have a time frame of 5 days for a response". "Our audit timeline guessed that it would take a business week for you to reply, so if you take longer we're behind schedule". The threatening version is "your response is required on or before five business days from the date of this message".
The presumption is that the person on the other end is also working through a task queue that they don't have much personal investment in, and is generally good natured, so you're telling them "I don't expect you to jump on this immediately, but wherever you can find a moment to reply this week would keep anyone from bothering me, and me from needing to send another email or trying to find a phone number"

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.

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.

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...

Fabric Bellard's body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.

Or just genius.

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!

Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you're on Systemd, are usually better suited.

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.

Fair point! I think that's part of why I admire him, humble greatness

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.

Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.

It's also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.

Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server

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.

Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don't remember). That's why it's called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.

I believe you're thinking of ed, and yes, grep was made out of ed. I remember reading about a university professor who, if memory serves, gave his students the code for ed and told them to turn it into (basically) grep. Said that no one ever managed, despite having more time than the original took in total. That's not to say I think this was fair or cool of the professor, it's just an interesting tale.

If he hadn't written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.

And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd

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.

She is kind of a shithead tbf and fwiw it’s more like she’s the only person who is willing to do it. granted cracking denuvo is something that is extremely difficult and only a small subset of people can do but it’s not like she’s literally the only person on the planet who can. There was that guy who would just release the yearly update of football manager, for one.

It’s far more likely the people who have that skill set just don’t really want to bother with cracking videogames and the potential legal issues that come with distributing them online.

True, but being the only person willing to do something is kind of laudable in it's own right. Like all of the open source projects relied upon by millions that are sometimes developed primarily by one person in their free time.

but my (not really my) conspiracy theory for this is the opposite of open source: when someone is good at cracking games companies like denuvo track them down and offer them jobs to harden their product and take another cracker out of the scene. like I bet denuvo is just filled with nerds that spent their teenage years in sketchy irc rooms with handles like -DooMSlAyEr- and used to actually be members of razor1911 before they realized they could get game companies to pay them 200k a year

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's exactly what Malus did and why it's harder to root iPhones nowadays (but the EU is seeing to that by forcing them to start opening up their walled garden).

Can't remember where I read it, but I think it's the dude who started AsahiLinux that shared part of his story in the scene. And a few dudes were tracked down and had the choice between a lawsuit and employment. Makes the decision pretty easy.

Doesn't help that they did their thing on Github and other public platforms instead of I2P or something.

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I can't help but laugh at how batshit crazy she is. Didn't she write a rap at some point??

I'll never not be convinced that she's on a fair amount of meth and/or crack.

It was somewhat weird waiting for the HP release on her TG channel.

Like I've seen my fair share of terf transphobes, but she's honestly best described as a hater.

There were so many rants.

But like with Harry Potter, I like to separate the artist from the art.

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...

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

You meant suffix, not prefix. But this is pretty funny regardless

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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.

Furthermore, "RUNK" was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s. Finally, it's missing some important functions that the original 60s program had because "RUNK"s developer doesn't see the purpose of those functions and refuses to add them; and no one has publically released a fork of "RUNK" that adds those functions back in, so you have to do it yourself. Thank God it's open source.

Edit: oh yeah, and back in 2005 there was an effort to make a GUI for it, but "RUNK's" sole developer got mad because "back in the 80s we didn't need GUIs; command line is infinitely faster" and kept intentionally breaking support for the GUI with each bug fix, leading to the project eventually being abandoned.

that really sounds like a case where someone ultimately says "fuck you, runk's developer". why didn't that happen?

Because frankly, Ronald (the current maintainer, not the original author) is very competent. I say this as somebody who has personally been yelled at by Ronald at a kernel summit; I didn't deserve it, but none of his technical points were wrong. I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it'd still take three of me to do Ronald's job. (Well, "job." I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?) Not to excuse his conduct, just to explain why he's not been replaced yet.

Wait if it stands for Ronald's Universal Number Kounter, does that mean both the creator and current maintainer are named Ronald? Is it a dread pirate kinda deal where whoever holds the hat takes the name?

it's a case where he knows a guy just like Ronald but he's not naming him, so he's just talking about "Ronald"

I'd love to link you to their Wikipedia pages, but both of them are redlinked. As far as I can tell, Dr. V. Ronald was an educator who moved from Canada to the USA as part of the whole Xerox PARC thing and probably was valued for mainframe experience; does anybody have a full bio? The current maintainer is Ron Sunk, who did a full run at MIT up through postdoc before going to Red Hat. The names are a coincidence; runk implements what we now call Sunk summation, after Sunk's thesis. (As you might guess, that's an instance of Stigler's law, since clearly Dr. Ronald discovered Sunk summation first!)

Also, as long as we're here, I want to empathize a little with Sunk. The GUIs that folks have placed on runk, like GNOME's Gunk or Enlightenment's enk, look very cool, and there's rumors of an upcoming unified number-counting protocol that will put them all on equal ground. But @MossyFeathers@pawb.social wasn't joking; Dr. Arnold's code literally only reads punch cards, and there's a façade to make it work on modern Linux and BSD transparently. It predates X11, if that's any help. The tech debt is real.

core-js (whose maintainer is also a bit picky about and probably doesn't understand the OSS process) Phil Katz, the guy who invented .zip. To this day, every .zip file contains his initials in hexadecmial. His story is incredibly interesting.

The core-js story 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.

It's especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.

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.

Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He's been taken advantage of by the whole world.

Runk means masturbation in Icelandic so that adds another layer of hilarity to this

I'm from the west coast of Canada, a euphemism for jerking off where/when I grew up is "pulling the pud." Moving to the UK had some funny bits...like Christmas Pud...as in pudding(dessert). Pronounced slightly different, but my inner 6 year old had a laugh anyway.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pudendum

It's a more general English phrase. Could come up with a good insult for transphobes with this though. "Pud CHUDs?"

If I'm remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There's a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on "Sailing the Seas of Cheese" that's just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: "As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there's a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you."

Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn't think I've listened to that album since the 90's. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.

God...Primus is such a great band. I'll have to dig out my albums and have a listen again.

Wasn't the phrase supposed to be "Primus sucks"? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.

That does ring a bell. I wouldn't say I was a fan, I bought a few of their albums, and enjoyed them, but idk if I'd be able to name one of their albums or songs...

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I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.

Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.

When the US came close to going on permanent daylight savings time there were interesting discussions there.

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 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.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).

Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.

Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people

Also the guy who fixed GTA Online's ridiculous loading times.

“Yeah, the load times are shit, but they aren’t shit enough to tell some intern to spend two months figuring out what’s going on.”

“What about when some nerd fixes it in a week and embarrasses us when he shows how it was caused by the addition of the shop?”

“We’ll fucking sue, that’s what.”

“What if we just paid him the bug bounty instead?”

“Fine, no need to Streisand this time, I guess.”

Rockstar being actual rockstars in their response :D

There's also Arx Libertatis for Arx Fatalis. Arkane (yes, that Arkane) released the source code for the game. This is a new engine and patch that is basically required. Even if you could play the game on a modern computer (you can't really) you wouldn't want to play without this patch. It does things like making drawing the runes for casting spells more reliable. (For those not aware, you drew runes on your screen and combined them to create spells. You didn't just press a fireball button. You had to figure out what spells combined to make a fireball, and then draw it.)

If you like ImSims or Arkane games, I highly recommend Arx Fatalis. No one has done magic like it since. To be fair, it was one of the slowest and most cumbersome ways to do magic, but it did actually feel like you were part of it. You could cast spells before you learned them if you had the rune and guessed the combination (they all make sense). There were even some spells never told in game that you were expected to figure out. Cheats were even activated using the system, by drawing a certain combination of runes. It's all very cool, and I wish we would get a second modern version of the idea.

making drawing the runes for casting spells more reliable

Huh....guess I might actually be able to give it a proper go then. I couldn't ever play more than 2-3 30min sessions every few years as I'd get so so so very frustrated with trying to draw runes.

The OG solution was to use stretched 4:3/resolution, nyt Arx Libertatis allows easy casting with modern resolution.

You might like the dark mod if you haven’t heard of it

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?

It's really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn't been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it's one of those things that's hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.

Yet the vast majority of the world probably don't even know what it is, and wouldn't even understand it if it was explained to them.

Git is not the only version control software out there, and not the first one either.

Facebook for example is famous for not using git. Because their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better.

Microsoft didn't use git until relatively recently either. They had to make some big contributions to make it work for their system.

Man, I remember ancient gmod addons released using (iirc) turtle svn so they could auto update. Was a wild time.

turtle svn

that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.

That’s a name I’ve never heard before. I have heard of Tortoise SVN though.

Th devs at my current organization use turtle svn, but that seems to be more down to organizational politics combined with a misunderstanding that git is platform agnostic rather than anything based on merits

their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better

The version I heard was that hg people were way nicer to them and very much willing to help compared to git.

I feel like Linus got a taste of his own medicine dealing with Gtk and Gnome people while developing Subsurface and that caused them to switch to Qt.

IIRC it's both, sort of. They've contributed a lot to mercurial and, yes, that's largely thanks to mercurial folks being more open and receptive to their desired changes compared to git. But they also have internal tools that build on top of mercurial, tools that you're very unlikely to see used outside facebook projects.

That make sense mercurial is in python, building on top is easier than C that got is made from

t’s really hard to imagine a world without Git

I've lived it.

  • CriticalFile.vbs
  • CriticalFile.V2.vbs
  • CripicalFile.V2.5.vbs
  • CriticalFile.DONOTEDIT.txt
  • _Old.CriticalFile.aspx
  • LinkToCriticalFilesFold.lnk
  • GuideToDeploying.CriticalFliles.doc
  • CritFil.bat

The first job I had out of college was doing development on the production server with this method of version control. I still have nightmares.

Lots of people still split latex documents into one section per file, because subversion used file locks and we only knew how one person could edit a file at a time.

It's not like there was nothing at all in that space before git came along, e.g. we had svn before, and mercurial more or less in parallel.

And it all happened because botbicket decided to become greedy, to which Linus responded with taking a month break from Linux to make his own basic versioning tool, and here we are.

Without bitbuckets decisions, wer all still be stuck with SVn shudder

Not necessarily! Maybe we would live in a world of mercurial, or even some other alternative.

And it wasn't bitbucket (botbicket?), but BitKeeper, which gave the Kernel folks a license to use BK, but with some restrictions. Among those was a "no reverse engineering" clause, which is what eventually lead to the revoking of that license—lots of interesting articles on this!—frustrating Linus for a few weeks, and finally the start of Git.

You're completely right, I mixed up the name over the years. Either way, that action indeed led to git, which killed off bitkeeper

Minor correction, it was Bitkeeper/BitMover - not Bitbucket. They were proprietary software linux used w/ a community license, and they later removed that free tier.

Oh yeah, you're right! It's been a while.

Everybody would use Mercurial, since Fossil completely lost the race, and both Subversion and CVS are unfit for today's needs.

What is too bad, because Fossil would be much more productive than Git or Mercurial if the software just finished running at all; and Mercurial is way easier to learn than Git.

Really easy to imagine that world to most people. Like me. Who inspite of using computers since my 386sx family pc, never got into software engineering.

I understand a little about it, but its just a name of a thing i dont know how to use lol

I just find it funny how its a kind of ignorance(for entirely understandable reasons)is bliss situation to me, but a horror to those who use it

Git has tons of contributors though.

Yeah, and Linus mostly handed off the project to Junio Hamano quite early on (same year, 2005). Seriously, huge kudos to Junio for all his work. Still, it's fun to say this quirky guy who likes penguins started not one, but two free software projects that took the world by storm. Humbling, even.

Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.

The modern man uses ripgrep 👍

What does that offer offer grep/egrep

  • much faster

  • proper unicode (and other encodings) support

  • automatic recursion (no extra flags needed)

  • can search inside compressed files/archives like gz/xz/zip (also see ripgrep-all) for even more archive support)

  • honors .gitignore and ignores binary/hidden files

probably a lot more things too

Speed and memory efficiency, mostly. If you ever have to grep for something in a large number of files ripgrep will be done while regular grep will only be reaching the 25% mark.

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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.

left-pad was the first thing that came to mind for me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

Azer did nothing wrong.

Laurie Voss made a bad call and should feel bad.

The principals of free software was, is, and always will be more important than every single dollar in silicon valley combined.

No arguments there, if you're gonna depend on a piece of code, you better own it or have a rock solid plan b.

I think he overreacted a bit, not to having his package name forcibly taken from him, but to being asked to give it up in the first place. Kik explained to him that they have to fight this or lose their tradmark because thats how trademark law works. His response was basically "haha fuck you". He probably could've asked for a couple thousand and just changed the name of his project and everything would've been fine.

being asked to give it up in the first place. Kik explained to him that they have to fight this or lose their tradmark because thats how trademark law works.

I'm not a lawyer but from what I know that's a load of shit. There's nothing stopping a trademark holder from granting licensing rights to third parties, without charge, to use their trademark in specific ways.

They chose not to because its easier, and most people won't know better, so they roll over.

His response was basically "haha fuck you". He probably could've asked for a couple thousand and just changed the name of his project and everything would've been fine.

This is the correct response, even if Kik would've given him money. It's his package, he got the name first. Corpos can eat shit, just because its not the easy choice, or the choice you would've made doesn't mean it was wrong. That package should've stayed down on principal.

Yeah that debacle still pisses me off. Especially the fact that someone could possibly trademark and enforce a trademark a name that’s already in use. It’s made even worse that the package that now uses the stolen name is defunct.

I hope all of the bad actors burn in Hell.

What pisses me off is that NPM thought it would be okay to remove something from their repository.

What did NPM remove? My understanding is that NPM restored the deleted package. If you’re referring to giving the author the ability to delete their packages, I’m on the fence about that. On the one hand, if it’s open source, it’s a part of the community. On the other hand, it’s also still the author’s code, and if they are the only author, then it’s their sole decision if they want to host their code under their account.

But at the same time if the code is properly licensed under an open source license (I would assume/hope NPM didn't allow non FOSS code) then NPM can refuse to take it down. Yes, they put it back up, but I think it's important for public repositories (as in packaged code repositories, not got repositories) to never remove things (barring legal requirements, sure).

For what it's worth, the policy they adopted after the fact seemed pretty sensible. I think it was something like you can't take things down once they have ~100 downloads or x number of dependents.

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....

It was also being ruthless beyond belief, and destroying anything that could have challenged them. They've held progress back for 40 or 50 years.

Reflecting on my IT education in school, it feels like it was mostly learning to use Microsoft Office. Reflecting on it makes me horrified, because I feel like we're heading for a period where only a select few have tech skills and the skills gap we already see is going to get way worse. That's what intense lobbying from Microsoft will get you

I'm shocked by how little new programmers know.

Yeah! These Generation X programmers know nothing about low-level languages and electrical engineering. They're compelled to put everything on the World Wide Web even when it's unnecessary.

I don't really mean coding languages. That's stuff they learn in school. But what a lot of people seem to be lacking is the ability to find answers on their own, how to troubleshoot problems they haven't encountered before, and the ability to work independently. There's a whole lot of hand-holding happening.

The thing I'm concerned about is how little non-programmers know. I think that much of the world went "oh, GenZ are digital natives, that means they'll know their way around computers naturally" when if anything, being "digital natives" is part of the problem. But like my original comment said, I attribute a lot of blame to Microsoft's impact on IT education.

I can't speak much on how much programmers tend to know, because I am a biochemist who started getting into programming when studying bioinformatics, and then I've continued dabbling as a hobbyist. I like to joke that I'm a better programmer than the vast majority of biochemists, and that's concerning, because I'm a mediocre programmer (at best).

Oh yes, that is very concerning. They grew up with software developed for the lowest common denominator, and phones that do many of the things that computers were relied upon previously. Most people know how to go online, post stuff to social media, and that's about it. It's scary.

Friends?, bill gates mother worked there

And Woz wasn't the only genius who worked at Apple at the time. Pretty much everyone who worked on the original Macintosh was brilliant.

Is-even and is-odd on npm.

For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.

Like half of the npm is maintained by a single, arguably awful, person who writes his microprojects into large pieces of software to maximize how often his code gets installed.

Sindre Sorhus?

Just looked them up… holy hell. How does one have so many repos! And all the apps he’s made. What’s the story on them?

Edit: just looked it up myself. Seems to be a well liked person in the open source community. Idk. Regardless, props to them for the work they put in.

Jon Schlinkert, I believe. Sindre has a lot of stuff as well, but has a better reputation afaik

The popularity of these two packages shows that something is very wrong with JavaScript.

No, it shows people are lazy.

Well, that as well, but it’s an also bit tricky to safely check if a number is even because JavaScript uses floats for numbers.

I would love this even more if one depended on the other and just did a “not even” for example.

I thought that was the case tbh, has it changed?

Edit: is-even depends on is-odd.

Imagemagick.

Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.

Another one is OpenSSL.

I like the imagemagick .desktop file that is always created when you install the package. It opens up a really terrible and dated paint-like program that no one ever uses.

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.

Ronald is Linus Torvald zloirock, and his contribution is immeasurable.

Edit: you can see in the replies to this comment that Linus was a poor example. There are people with an almost equivalent contribution to the digital world who have seen almost no recognition at all.

I think Linus sits at the intersection of both groups. Linus is not some Ronald. The Ronalds of this world are for example the creator of core-js.

Still mad about what happened to that guy.

What happened to him?

It's linked on that page. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

I just finished reading his story and wtf! Man, I sent him $25. It's not a lot, but hopefully it covers my tiny bit of usage of that polyfill, back when I used it.

I had no idea that package was used so extensively. Good lord! I actually just recently removed it from most of my projects because the features I needed it for now have broad browser support.

Isn’t Linus pretty famous for his tech tips YouTube channel?

Wrong Linus, That's Linus Sebastian.

Woosh?

You'd be surprised how many programmers don't know who Torvalds is if you ask them. They might be aware of his impact or some of the things he did, but the name Linus will not ring a bell for them. So yeah, might be a whoosh, might not be, but there is enough plausible naiveness imo.

Actually I think he has already had an adequate amount of recognition:

  • "In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.[29] That year both companies went public and Torvalds's share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million"

  • his autobiography is in several hundred library collections worldwide

Awards he's received:

  • 2 honorary doctorates

  • 2 celestial objects named after him

  • Lovelace Medal

  • IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

  • EFF Pioneer Award

  • Vollum Award

  • Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum

  • C&C prize

  • Millenium Technology Prize

  • Internet Hall of Fame

  • IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award

  • Great Immigrants Award

Wow! A company gave away money without being contractually obligated to do so? The world sure has changed since then. I'm glad that Torvalds is doing well, he completely changed the world.

I wonder how Brahm Cohen is doing. He also had a huge impact on the world. I know he got a write-up in Wired Magazine after inventing Bit Torrent (that's how I learned about it way back then), but I haven't heard much about him since.

Although it's now a larger organization, Redis was started and maintained by some guy that just wanted to make his website faster. It's very widely deployed.

Isn't that something that was basically taken over by corporate people?

Yup... IIRC they basically started a company with a similar name when they didn't really have any association with the project then slowly consumed it.

It's okay you can just say FFmpeg

Also Linux

Also CoreJS

Also

sure? i tried 8bit transparent grayscale png generation and it turns out imagemagick produces images the kindle can display and ffmpeg fucks them up majorly and they wont show on kindle. ffmpeg is nice though.

FFmpeg is basically the only piece of audio/video conversion software in widespread use. Everything uses it under the hood. Microsoft Teams used it to stream your webcam. VLC uses it to play video. If you've ever uploaded your video to an online service to convert it to a different file format or codec, chances are the server that processed it did so using FFmpeg.

I have also noticed that FFmpeg kind of sucks at generating stills for reasons I'm not sure about though.

i know. i use ffmpeg for grading, keying etc in scripts...love it. but it is not good at stills.

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.

And IMO Koçulu should have sued NPM for everything they had. What NPM did to Koçulu was in violation of everything they stood for. Koçulu was there first with the Kik name, he should have had 100% of the rights to keep it.

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... 🤔

xz seems like another good example

I'd put the deflate algorithm over the LZMA algorithm just because deflate is used by both windows (zip) and Unix (gzip). Windows I don't think has added LZMA/xz support until recently if at all.

I agree but windows does come with a version of tar preinstalled installed. I'm not sure if it uses xz though.

The reason I named xz though is the xz-utils backdoor that was such a big deal.

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.

GNU readline is a library that handles text input

How does one go about finding these people and make sure they don't end up like the dude that maintains slackware?