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.
runk is the thomas ladder of our era
I agree
It’s okay you can just say FFmpeg
Also Linux
Also CoreJS
Also
sure? i tried 8bit transparent grayscale png generation and it turns out imagemagick produces images the kindle can display and ffmpeg fucks them up majorly and they wont show on kindle. ffmpeg is nice though.
FFmpeg is basically the only piece of audio/video conversion software in widespread use. Everything uses it under the hood. Microsoft Teams used it to stream your webcam. VLC uses it to play video. If you’ve ever uploaded your video to an online service to convert it to a different file format or codec, chances are the server that processed it did so using FFmpeg.
I have also noticed that FFmpeg kind of sucks at generating stills for reasons I’m not sure about though.
i know. i use ffmpeg for grading, keying etc in scripts…love it. but it is not good at stills.
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.
And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).
I cannot for the life of me find what you’re referencing. I only remember the
sqlite/etilqsfiasco with McAfee.https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
Here’s an example from NASA
I feel a bit split about this. Seems it is an actual law, and it kind of makes sense. You probably don’t want random components from unknown people and places in your multi million dollar space equipment. But it feels rather arrogant to just demand such things.
Is NASA actually a customer? Did they pay for a license to use curl (genuine question - I’m not familiar enough with it to know if enterprises and organisations require a paid license)? Are they planning on becoming a paying customer? Do they make donations to the project? If not, it feels kind of rude to send a demand letter to the lead developer of a free piece of software straight up demanding a formal letter stating where the free software is being developed and maintained (for free), or if outside the USA, that the free software has been tested in the USA. Oh, and a bonus demand that such information be returned within 5 business days (naturally with an implied “or else”, just to really make sure those pesky people maintaining open source software for free really get the memo)
In any case, why don’t all their scary 3 letter spy agencies go and figure it out on behalf of NASA themselves? It’s open source, they could just like, read the source, test the source, and audit the source themselves. Or fork it and make any modifications they’d like to ensure its safety
I don’t blame the person sending the emails, obviously, they’re just following orders, but the whole email reads as very entitled and arrogant, assuming NASA don’t provide any compensation to the project and projects maintainers for their use of curl
https://bagder.github.io/emails/ has the email collection.
Thank you!! I knew I must have been missing something.
Thanks for sharing these gems. I can almost feel the exasperation in some of the emails and their replies.
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.
Ronald is Linus Torval, and his contribution is immeasurable.
Isn’t Linus pretty famous for his tech tips YouTube channel?
Wrong Linus, That’s Linus Sebastian.
Woosh?
You’d be surprised how many programmers don’t know who Torvalds is if you ask them. They might be aware of his impact or some of the things he did, but the name Linus will not ring a bell for them. So yeah, might be a whoosh, might not be, but there is enough plausible naiveness imo.
One can only hope
I think Linus sits at the intersection of both groups. Linus is not some Ronald. The Ronalds of this world are for example the creator of core-js.
Oh hey! I’ve used that package for years.
And so did most of the world
I just read his usage statistics on the GitHub page. Holy crap! I thought it was just some small project that a cool dude shared back when I originally found it. Perhaps it was, back then.
Still mad about what happened to that guy.
What happened to him?
It’s linked on that page. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md
I just finished reading his story and wtf! Man, I sent him $25. It’s not a lot, but hopefully it covers my tiny bit of usage of that polyfill, back when I used it.
I had no idea that package was used so extensively. Good lord! I actually just recently removed it from most of my projects because the features I needed it for now have broad browser support.
Actually I think he has already had an adequate amount of recognition:
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“In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.[29] That year both companies went public and Torvalds’s share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million”
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his autobiography is in several hundred library collections worldwide
Awards he’s received:
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2 honorary doctorates
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2 celestial objects named after him
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Lovelace Medal
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IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
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EFF Pioneer Award
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Vollum Award
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Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum
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C&C prize
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Millenium Technology Prize
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Internet Hall of Fame
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IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award
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Great Immigrants Award
Wow! A company gave away money without being contractually obligated to do so? The world sure has changed since then. I’m glad that Torvalds is doing well, he completely changed the world.
I wonder how Brahm Cohen is doing. He also had a huge impact on the world. I know he got a write-up in Wired Magazine after inventing Bit Torrent (that’s how I learned about it way back then), but I haven’t heard much about him since.
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Oh and then you get all the projects with recursive acronyms, like WINE Is Not Emulation, MAME Ain’t (an) Mp3 Encoder, and of course GNU’s Not Unix.
MAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder
You’re thinking of LAME. MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
See why those names are kinda dumb? You end up with a lot of fairly similar 4 letter words.
Noted. When I develop an essential piece of software, I will name it George.
Imagemagick.
Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.
Another one is OpenSSL.
I like the imagemagick .desktop file that is always created when you install the package. It opens up a really terrible and dated paint-like program that no one ever uses.
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:
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.
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?
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!
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.
Oh neato, then all good!
Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
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.
Sounds like a fork is in order
Sindre Sorhus?
Jon Schlinkert, I believe. Sindre has a lot of stuff as well, but has a better reputation afaik
That’s them, yup!
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?
I would love this even more if one depended on the other and just did a “not even” for example.
Well good news! Time to let yourself love again!
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.
Is-even and is-odd are the stupidest packages ever written. Except for all the others that guy wrote.
deleted
left-pad
The popularity of these two packages shows that something is very wrong with JavaScript.
No, it shows people are lazy.
Well, that as well, but it’s an also bit tricky to safely check if a number is even because JavaScript uses floats for numbers.
It’s not tricky. Modulus operator works fine.
curl
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are half guys.
They prefer to be called Hobbits.
What are half guys anyway? Are they missing a ball? A few screws?
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.
I don’t know, rm being short for “remove” is very verbaceous.
Oh go fsck yourself (maybe that works better written…).
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.
Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server
Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed. 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
If he hadn’t written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it’s a brilliant piece of software xD
Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
That’s actually the video I was retelling from memory.
Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He’s been taken advantage of by the whole world.
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 either.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.
It’s especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
Huh… My dad is a software engineer and his name is Ronald. He also secured several software patents when he worked for a big chip wafer manufacturer. He might actually be the Ronald in this meme… 🤔
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.
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.
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.
No arguments there, if you’re gonna depend on a piece of code, you better own it or have a rock solid plan b.
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
So they have a donation/support page?
Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!
Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you’re on Systemd, are usually better suited.
