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.
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:
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!
deleted by creator
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”.
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 has organizational support from ICANN, so it’s not done in total isolation.
Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
Damn, I wanted to mention sqlite.
It’s not too late. Mention it!
And their website is quirky
As is their code of ethics.
Have something to share?
Lmao yo wtf
Jesus Christ
I see you like the first rule.
- Be a stranger to the world’s ways.
one out of 72 isn’t bad
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.
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.
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?
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;
runkimplements 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’senk, 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.
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.
Which podcast? Sounds like something I’d be interested in listening to
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.
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.
I’m telling this story from memory
pun intended? ;D
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.
TIL
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.
The
core-jsstory 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.
left-pad was the first thing that came to mind for me
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.
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.
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
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here’s the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
The curl author writes a lot about his struggles, but he’s also employed to maintain curl, so not really a good example
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…
also the swedish meme subreddit is called r/unket
and runket translates to “the jerk”, as in a noun referring the act of (and/or the result of…) rubbing one out.
ie a Swedish circlejerk subreddit?
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
I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
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.
It would be even better if each one depended on the other.
Well good news! Time to let yourself love again!
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?
Jon Schlinkert, I believe. Sindre has a lot of stuff as well, but has a better reputation afaik
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I remember those days. I used mercurial and svn. And file locking in other solutions.
I’m so happy with git.
Man, I remember ancient gmod addons released using (iirc) turtle svn so they could auto update. Was a wild time.
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
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.
Meh, I knew what wizardbeard meant.
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.
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.
