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.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            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.

  • frezik@midwest.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      1 year ago

      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…

  • blindbunny@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

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

        • superkret@feddit.org
          0·
          1 year ago

          He was forced to move from California back to Minnesota cause he couldn’t afford life on the west coast anymore.
          Recently he stated in an interview that it’s getting tight in Michigan, too.
          But he still has a hobby of restoring old cars from the 60’s so he’s not starving.
          I’m donating a monthly amount to him (roughly the equivalent of what I’d pay for an M365 subscription), cause IMO Slackware needs to survive.
          Unfortunately, he’d need about 200 regular donaters like that to live off, and Slackware’s user base probably isn’t large enough for that anymore.

  • dosse91@lemmy.trippy.pizza
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Fred@programming.devEnglish
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      1 year ago

      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…

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Pyro@programming.dev
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
        0·
        1 year ago

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

  • general_kitten@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    1 year ago

    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

    • brisk@aussie.zone
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.