zlib: Mark Adler
ncurses/xterm: Thomas Dickey
Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#62Time Zone Database https://github.com/eggert/tz/graphs/contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database
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/
Same as with glibc and Ullrich Drepper.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#63e2fsprogs (https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs) is a widely-used utility suite for creating, maintaining, and repairing ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#64Just 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?
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 hea…
Copyright on your contributions may belong to employer during employment period in most jurisdictions.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#65- curl: Daniel Stenberg et al. - https://github.com/orgs/curl/people - Lua (programming language): team of 3 - https://www.lua.org/authors.html - openssl: 15 people - https://github.com/orgs/openssl/people maybe also: sqlite, vim, nginx, redis
> 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/prosup…
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.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hea…
Copyright on your contributions may belong to employer during employment period in most jurisdictions.
Maybe but you may have permissions to make it open source.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#67In some sense, the ubiquitous "unzip" has 0 maintainers.
Per the upstream, 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/
(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)
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its wrong, or at least not my definition of few people. https://thephp.foundation/structure/ "Core Developers The PHP Foundation contracts 10 full-time and part-time engineers to maintain and develop the PHP language."
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)
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.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
And most of what happens in those utilities is updating the copyright year numbers.
Which seems wholly unnecessary. The way I understand it, having only the starting year is sufficient.
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.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#70- curl: Daniel Stenberg et al. - https://github.com/orgs/curl/people - Lua (programming language): team of 3 - https://www.lua.org/authors.html - openssl: 15 people - https://github.com/orgs/openssl/people maybe also: sqlite, vim, nginx, redis
15 people is not "a few", it's a substantial group.
How many maintainers for the other ones you mentioned?