Open Source is one person

Post by ebiester » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

gausswho wrote: post #53

didgetmaster wrote: post #49

Has anyone seen any stats on what happens to a single maintainer project when said person is hit by a bus (or meets some other demise)? With that many data points, there should be enough of them by now to study it. Is the project taken over by another, single developer? Is it replaced by a similar project? Does it just go away?

I would love to see a diligently researched episodic series, every episode covering the transition of a popular open-source library/tool/app/site from one maintainer to the next. And that's why I don't run Netflix.

Post by dghlsakjg » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

andersmurphy wrote: post #5

I find it more concerning that the DoD uses node. I might be wrong but npm etc feels like a very large attack surface.

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #13

vitonsky wrote: post #11

Huh, I just checked stats on ecosyste.ms It looks they consider as maintainer only those people who listed on package.json, not a real number of contributors on github or anything. So all conclusions in this post is based on wrong assumption and incorrect data interpretation. That's all you need to know about it. I think you could list random people on github in your package.json to looks cool in eyes of stats cultis…

that and, i would argue that npm in particular is filled with lots of small projects and only very few large ones simply by the nature of the ecosystem. it is the wrong place to look. something better would probably be to eg count the contributors on github, or, on npm, analyze project dependencies and distinguish projects that are directly downloaded vs those that are loaded as a dependency. arguably, dependencies c…

Post by Wololooo » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

IAmBroom wrote: post #58

ysofunny wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

software once "perfected" (working well enough long enough) needs NO maintenance. No cleaning. No calibrating/tunning. updating is a systemic issue, not a per-project matter

That is a hysterically wrong statement. It is true of Solitaire, Minesweeper, Calculator, and Notepad, and probably about the same number of programs on other OSes. (Notepad has recently had an important expansion of functionality, but it didn't NEED that change.) It's also true of some dinosaurs I have on my system, that copy DVDs and so forth. It's not true of most other applications, nor can it be true, unless the…

Post by marssaxman » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

ii41 wrote: post #42

blueflow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we need a Linux distro based on "inactive" software and look how reliably it performs.

I was once forced to use older (but not deprecated) LTS Ubuntu and I hated it. New software come out and you're gonna want to use them (often forced to use them), and they of course use newer dependencies. I had to do the distribution maintainer job and package a bunch of software myself.