Sci-Hub anyone?

Alexandra Elbakyan manages this truly awesome source of scientific papers completely on her own. She got sued twice and lost, had to change the URL multiple times due to takedowns and only gets along by donations.

Werner Koch, the guy who created, and who has maintained for 25 years now, pretty much all by himself, GnuPG, the modern email encryption replacement for PGP.

Just the other day, I realized I actually live just a few kms away from the guy, here in Germany … very tempted to reach out to him someday and actually buy him an actual coffee.

cURL was one of these for a while (according to my limited understanding)

It was made in the 90s and it didn’t get commercial support until a few years ago.

Left pad https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/

Had GPT summarize what happened.

The “left pad” incident refers to a controversy that arose in 2016 when a developer named Azer Koçulu removed his JavaScript package called “left-pad” from the NPM (Node Package Manager) registry. This caused a ripple effect, breaking numerous projects that relied on this package and highlighting the potential risks of relying on external dependencies. The incident sparked a debate about the stability and trustworthiness of the open-source ecosystem and led to discussions about best practices for managing dependencies in software development.

The core-js library is used by 1000s of top websites and is maintained by one guy
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js

I didn’t even know about core-js until the dev complained about all the sites which use it. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

Basically every Windows sysadmin is indebted to Mark Russinovich and SysInternals. Fortunetly, PowerToys has come a long way because I’m pretty sure sysinternals haven’t been updated since Windows XP.