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Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
101–110 of 112 posts
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#102Note 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.
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.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#103GnuPG and Werner Koch comes to mind, there was this HN thread 10 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791
Also Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg and his projects comes to mind.
I might be wrong too.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#104Just 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?
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.)
Sounds terrible. Is there such a software project?
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Sounds terrible. Is there such a software project?
Oh yes, I'm sure there are. I maintain a few; none are ultra-popular but some are kind-of-popular. And I am sure that others have had this sentiment before and wrote something which others now rely on, without being particularly passionate about continued development of that thing. And it becomes like a chore which you know is important to many people rather than just one or two.
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
> 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...
All hail the actual time lord
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds terrible. Is there such a software project?
Oh yes, I'm sure there are. I maintain a few; none are ultra-popular but some are kind-of-popular. And I am sure that others have had this sentiment before and wrote something which others now rely on, without being particularly passionate about continued development of that thing. And it becomes like a chore which you know is important to many people rather than just one or two.
<3
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#108In 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 th…
zstd is not zip and pkware has long been irrelevant
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#109Perfect software doesn't need to be maintained. TM
Re: Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
#110In 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 th…
zstd is not zip and pkware has long been irrelevant
DEFLATE isn't zip either, what's your point?