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.
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.
Furthermore, “RUNK” was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s.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.
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.
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.
The guy that runs Rufus.
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here’s the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
That’s not remotely true, but it is nevertheless outstanding work and very much deserving of recognition and support.
curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can’t even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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!
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.
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.
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
I’m telling this story from memory
pun intended? ;D
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
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.
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:
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’s also worth pointing out that this was sued in a copyright lawsuit some time ago. The wikipedia article mentions it, but here’s the slashdot discussion if you want to feel like stepping into a time machine: https://m.slashdot.org/story/158778
It caused a momentary panic when everyone realized that this thing runs the system clocks for everything everywhere, and if it got taken down by a copyright suit it would be disastrous for, well, everybody.
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!
Wasn’t there also very recently a whole thing about the single guy who maintains the NTP spec threatened to retire so he could get a “real” job, which caused a gigantic internet-wide panic as pretty much everything we do relies on computer’s clocks being perfectly synced?
