Open Source is one person

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/

by LawnGnome • 11 months ago

435 176 11 months ago

[Relevant xkcd.](https://xkcd.com/2347/)

It's interesting to see the periodic rediscovery of "capitalism + technology relies on unpaid, voluntary labour", or as the author puts it, "Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars".

The one flaw that I see in the author's analysis though is that they don't seem to account for whether the packages accounted for by their source have dependents or monthly downloads. There's *a lot* of dead code out there. When excluding abandoned packages, I bet the picture is still grim, but it might be less so.

sorrythanks• 11 months ago

half way down the page:

So now, let’s look at the number of maintainers for projects with over 1 million downloads this month.

speakingmoistly2• 11 months ago

Fair point, I glossed over that part a bit fast.

It does go in the direction I thought it would though. I'd be curious to see (or to take) a look a little deeper at what those thousand of packages are.

thisoneworks• 11 months ago

You can frame the "unpaid voluntary labor" as "creative work" and it would start making a whole lot of sense. "Creative work thrives despite being unpaid in capitalist society."

socalgal2• 11 months ago

I’d state that as capitalism + technology provides enough surplus money and time that people can work on hobbies

EdiX2• 11 months ago

capitalism + technology relies on unpaid, voluntary labour

You are falling into the breadtube trap of faulting capitalism for a societal issue that has nothing to do with it. Did capitalism force people to have productive hobbies? Would you prefer a system, other than capitalism, that prevented people from having productive hobbies?

Often times this error relies on the assumption that capitalism is what's preventing us from having an "idealized" version of communism that I've heard aptly described as Gay Luxury Space Communism, where anyone can do anything they want and society just magically pays for it. The problem is that GLSC isn't real, we'd need ~infinite resources to do it.

I personally blame this problem on charities. This is the type of problem that charities and foundations should solve but there is no safeguard for charity money actually going to the charity's cause of action, instead the moment you create any kind of non profit it transforms into Non Profit (inc) and all the money it received goes to (1) professional non-profit people for the job of raising money and redistributing it, (2) shuffled to other non-profits, (3) thinly disguised political activism.

tracker18• 11 months ago

I wish I could +1 this many times over. Mozilla and Wikipedia are two great examples of this... so much of the expenses are diverted to busy work and so much less to the added value to society.

wolvesechoes• 11 months ago

It is funny how you recognize the "breadtube trap", yet you are so invested in the "no alternative" ideology.

blueflow3• 11 months ago

If they had done an activity check they would have seen that half of all projects have zero maintainers.

ysofunny• 11 months ago

software once "perfected" (working well enough long enough) needs NO maintenance. No cleaning. No calibrating/tunning.

updating is a systemic issue, not a per-project matter

blueflow3• 11 months ago

Maybe we need a Linux distro based on "inactive" software and look how reliably it performs.

kube-system12• 11 months ago

Under a microscope, maybe.

But if you had a "perfect" piece of software that used Log4j in 2020, it wouldn't have been perfect for long.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of reasons that software needs maintenance, even if it was thought to be perfect when it was originally written.

Hardware changes. The software landscape changes. Dependencies are deprecated, or are found to have their own problems. Vulnerabilities are discovered. Vulnerabilities are found that aren't even the fault of your software, maybe they are a flaw in the hardware your software runs on, and the only way to fix it is via a software mitigation. These are all real things that happen to otherwise perfect software.

IAmBroom3• 11 months ago

That is a hysterically wrong statement.

It is true of Solitaire, Minesweeper, Calculator, and Notepad, and probably about the same number of programs on other OSes. (Notepad has recently had an important expansion of functionality, but it didn't NEED that change.)

It's also true of some dinosaurs I have on my system, that copy DVDs and so forth.

It's not true of most other applications, nor can it be true, unless the app works in a sealed, unchanging environment.

Even then... Voyager 2 recently required a software upgrade, IIRC.

chamomeal2• 11 months ago

Definitely varies with language/runtime/library choice. I have no problem using a clojure library that hasn’t been touched in 5 years. But back when I had a gatsby site (static site generator for react) I would end up in the dependency hell after literally a month of not touching it

rs186• 11 months ago

LOL. As soon as Python 3.8 is deprecated/replaced by Python 3.9+ in most systems, python packages that depend on old APIs become useless until updated. Any half decent software engineer understands this.

AlienRobot• 11 months ago

You'd think so, but you make something then it doesn't work on a new version of windows, or it doesn't work on a new version of python because one of your dependencies isn't available for that version of python, or it doesn't work on linux if it doesn't have a specific version of packages, or it doesn't work on the browser because they're ditching manifest v2, or it doesn't work on android because you need to provide more personal information or your app will be unpublished.

At this point I have a feeling "perfect" software only exists in hardware like consoles where updates just stop one day.

M95D• 11 months ago

Nicely said, but the reality is that no software is "perfected", just abandoned.

Hell, even sysvinit had some big updates recently.

paulddraper• 11 months ago

Can you provide an example?

A perfected software that had existed >5 years with zero updates, tweaks, ports, or fixes?

andersmurphy• 11 months ago

I find it more concerning that the DoD uses node.

I might be wrong but npm etc feels like a very large attack surface.

lantry• 11 months ago

The DoD is a huge organization, so I'd guess they use almost everything.

kube-system12• 11 months ago

The DoD is a huge organization

That's an understatement if there ever was one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

tracker18• 11 months ago

There's a reason it's the largest budget item outside entitlements. There's a lot of money flowing into DoD (and Military Industrial Complex vendors).

dghlsakjg• 11 months ago

Why?

The DOD is one of the world's largest organizations. There are people there who do things like publish newsletters and put up webpages for people like boy scouts to arrange tour bases. It is totally fine to use Node for things like that.

Those systems are not connected to the systems that fire missiles. If the sign up page for the 4th of July fireworks announcement gets vandalized, it isn't really an issue.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 11 months ago

I've heard good things about work done by this guy Linus. I'm pretty sure that I've used his work.

I think he comes from a country that borders Russia, so should we be worried?

I've done OSS for decades; mostly by myself, but sometimes, in teams of volunteers.

If anyone has any experience, working in teams of volunteers, it can be ... challenging.

It can definitely work, but not as often as you'd think. If it works, there's usually some "BDFL," or a common goal that has everyone on the same beam. In my case, it was usually the latter.

tarvaina• 11 months ago

(Off topic.)

Not only that, but Linus's parents were politically active communists and young Linus was a pioneer (like a boy scout but for communists). His father also lived in Moscow for several years on two separate occasions.

lo_zamoyski4• 11 months ago

Linus was a pioneer

Being a Young Pioneer or joining the Komsomol was not officially mandatory, but it functioned as a gatekeeper for any kind of advancement. Party membership operated the same way.

So, by themselves, they don't tell you whether the person in question is a communist.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 11 months ago

I don't think Russia (or China, either) has been truly communist, in a long time.

Not sure there are any real communist nations left. It's one of those ideologies that looks good on paper, but falls apart, as soon as humans get added to the soup.

Idealists never seem to account for base human nature.

kube-system12• 11 months ago

Linux is a well supported project with a lot of maintainers and support, it isn't a one-man project by Linus.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 11 months ago

Not anymore, but that was not always the case. He just has an extremely strong will, and a force of personality, that was able to shepherd the project through its nascent challenges.

I have founded fairly important projects (nowhere near on the scale of his work, though), but I don't have the force of personality he does, so tossing the keys to a new team, and walking away, is what worked for me.

iwontberude• 11 months ago

I feel like you’ve missed the sarcasm here and zeroed in on correcting PC. Good old HN

moktonar2• 11 months ago

Curious, because just recently he expelled Russian maintainers from the Linux project, just because

AlexeyBelov• 11 months ago

Just because? I don't think so. I remember the reasoning being provided.

poulpy123• 11 months ago

The title of the register article is completely disgusting

Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev

then in the article:

Hunted Labs told us that it didn't speak to Malinochkin prior to publication of its report today, and that it found no ties between him and any threat actor.

actionfromafar• 11 months ago

Aren't Russian developers on average more susceptible to the "wrench attack" though?

em-bee4• 11 months ago

they would probably still fake their identity to hide their tracks.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 11 months ago

Many of them don't live in Russia.

Some of the best engineers that I've worked with (in the US and Europe) are Russian. I've also been quite impressed with other former Iron Curtain developers. A lot of Chinese folks I've worked with have been good.

I know that some nations are known for threatening the relatives of expats, to get them to work on their behalf. Not very nice.

But state-sponsored Russian (or other nations, as well) is definitely something to be concerned about. I suspect a number of folks are concerned about the influence of American programmers. The CIA is known for using fairly innocuous employees of NPOs. My father was one.

pabs34• 11 months ago

Not necessarily, Australia has a law allowing the government to compel software devs to add backdoors and gag them to prevent people hearing about the backdoors.

https://scarff.id.au/blog/2023/state-actors-can-add-a-backdo...

aurareturn• 11 months ago

  The title of the register article is completely disgusting

Nearly all The Register articles are clickbaits or rage baits.

nwellnhof• 11 months ago

They're also from Great Britain which seems to have the most irrational hatred for everything Russian.

weirdpickles• 11 months ago

Yeah, it is pretty amazing but not surprising. The Register has taken to a certain kind of sensationalism as of late.

I found this interesting:

"Every piece of code written by Russians isn't automatically suspect, but popular packages with no external oversight are ripe for the taking by state or state-backed actors looking to further their aims," Smith told us in an email. "As a whole, the open source community should be paying more attention to this risk and mitigating it."

Uh, I guess? The nature of open source is supposed to be that the dev provides the effort and the code, and that's where the guarantee stops. It is up to the people who uses it to implement and ensure security. People treat OSS like it is a business product that must have drop-in replacement ready at all times.

The modern nature of development is perhaps my biggest gripe as a professional. There is little care given. Projects begin with importing dozens of other packages and libraries that we never look at, let alone fully understand. And it is normalized.

shark12• 11 months ago

Yeah, the subtle way to plant an idea. It's a crime again to a person have "certain nationalities".

int_19h2• 11 months ago

The real concern isn't the nationality per se, it's the vulnerability to blackmail by the state that has jurisdiction over you. It's not a matter of personal responsibility, but nevertheless it has to be accounted for.

For example, I am an American citizen, but I have extended family in Russia, and I would fully expect a place like DoD to be wary of that solely on the basis that it makes me susceptible to blackmail by Russian govt agencies by threatening my family.

aniviacat• 11 months ago

So while NPM has over 4 million single person projects, they have about 900,000 maintainers for those 4 million single person projects. This will be an important data point at the end.

Am I missing something or was it not, in fact, an important data point at the end?

gamerdonkey• 11 months ago

I didn't see it explicitly stated, but I think it supports the "overworked" part of this statement:

Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars (also a big number). Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the proper amount of resources they need. If you want to talk about possible risks to your supply chain, a single maintainer that’s grossly underpaid and overworked. That’s the risk. The country they are from is irrelevant.

gsliepen• 11 months ago

And even in projects that are maintained by more than one person, it's usually just a single person responsible for most of the commits.

joshdavham• 11 months ago

This is the exact reason I decided to avoid 11ty for my personal website and instead went with Jekyll [0].

[0] https://github.com/11ty/eleventy/graphs/contributors

vitonsky2• 11 months ago

Huh, I just checked stats on ecosyste.ms

It looks they consider as maintainer only those people who listed on package.json, not a real number of contributors on github or anything.

So all conclusions in this post is based on wrong assumption and incorrect data interpretation. That's all you need to know about it.

I think you could list random people on github in your package.json to looks cool in eyes of stats cultists.

em-bee4• 11 months ago

that and, i would argue that npm in particular is filled with lots of small projects and only very few large ones simply by the nature of the ecosystem. it is the wrong place to look. something better would probably be to eg count the contributors on github, or, on npm, analyze project dependencies and distinguish projects that are directly downloaded vs those that are loaded as a dependency. arguably, dependencies can be replaced by the developers of the project using it, so a developer of a dependency disappearing is less dramatic than if you use that project directly.

technically speaking, if you have a large project with many contributors, every contributor is often still only responsible for one small part of the project. linux kernel drivers and subsystems most have their dedicated developers. and very few of them each.

0cf8612b2e1e2• 11 months ago

leftpad was a minuscule project that could have been created by anyone. Yet its deletion caused chaos. There are certainly load bearing projects of moderate complexity that are still single person efforts.

msgodel• 11 months ago

Maintainers and contributors have overlapping but subtly different responsibilities AFAIK.

Maintainers are the ones responsible in the end for the state of the repo while contributors suggest changes.

vitonsky2• 11 months ago

I have couple open source NPM packages I develop together with other developers. In some of this packages I have less than 50% contributions in code. But I listed as contributor on NPM, just because I found this packages and did not update contributors list a long time.

So definitions does not matter when stats that author refers, does not include a developers who own over 50% code in repo, but includes me as contributor.

That's widely known problem of programmers to believe that world is perfect and all data are always actual. Actually it won't.

hermannj314• 11 months ago

The DoD is very efficient at finding something they are getting for free and convincing everyone it's in their best interest to pay a team of contractors for it.

kube-system12• 11 months ago

The city of Troy kind of got fucked that one time by free shit.

IAmBroom3• 11 months ago

Come on, tell me you don't want a pony!

BirAdam2• 11 months ago

This reminds me of the observation that adding people to a project doesn't necessarily increase productivity that much...

kube-system12• 11 months ago

I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding of this issue in the software community, because primarily, supply chain risk isn't a software or engineering issue. It's a governance issue.

Someone doesn't have to be a bad actor for a project to have supply chain risk. Nor do all who evaluate supply chain risk have the same security posture and evaluate risks the same as others might. The DoD likely has a very different set of risks they evaluate against for their security posture than you do.

Most supply chain risks are not an indictment of somebody's code or somebody's character. A lot of one person projects are risky just because they're only one person. Having a bus factor of one is a supply chain risk in and of itself.

And while most people don't prepare for war while choosing their packages, it's not unreasonable for a military to do so. During a war, the ability for people to govern themselves and their own projects often changes dramatically, even in democratic countries. It is entirely routine for countries to require cooperation by the force of law in war time, even the US can and has forced private companies to cooperate with war efforts. This is probably not in the security posture calculation for most of us. But it is for some.

conartist64• 11 months ago

Huh? The DoD would not have used the package if they hadn't read every line, locked it down for updates, and were ready to patch it themselves if needed. Can you really imagine in a war they'd be like "damn, if only there were a second person we also don't trust at all to do this work for us cause otherwise we'd just be SOL"

moron4hire• 11 months ago

I don't know where you're working, maybe you work in some secret lab where everything is air-gapped and not even the pigeons are allowed within a mile of the facility. In which case, what the hell are you doing commenting on a public message board?

That is absolutely not how DoD works. The vast majority of code is contracted out. Nobody from DoD side is reading any of the code. It's all a series of affidavits and audits for configuration management process. Vendors assert everything's cool. Failed audits lead to fines or revocation of access. And the audits check up on documentation and config. They don't dig into code.

At no point in time is anyone, anywhere, in this process reading every single line of code. Not even A single line of code. I doubt they even read the Software Bill of Materials we're supposed to generate, because I've never heard any feedback on any of it.

jandrewrogers• 11 months ago

It mostly doesn't work like that even for closed source in DoD. They have to weigh the risk against the very high cost of mitigating the risk. Their resources are large but not infinite.

Even if they trust the developer they may not trust their process. There are many cases of trusted developers having their development environments compromised such that bad actors were able to insert modifications into source trees, in commits signed by the developer. Most code is not developed in anything remotely resembling a high security context.

seangrogg3• 11 months ago

Damn, what country is this in? Maybe the US could learn a thing or two from this level of attention to detail.

kazinator• 11 months ago

DoD would not have used the package if ...

That's a lot of faith in military intelligence.

tracker18• 11 months ago

I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of work the DoD will use... It really depends on what you are working on and where it will be used. I've worked on govt adjacent, military and banking projects... The most locked down in terms of packages I can use have been banks. In one case, a lawyer had to review (mostly licensing) every package that got added in to the local npm mirror for allowed internal use.. and another review for every version bump. Then of course, the (one) guy retires and there's no reviews for a month (so much for the launch date).

I've also been in a sealed environment, where I literally had to hand copy jQuery from an internet connected computer on one side of the room to an internal dev computer on the other side of the room... no disks, usb drives, etc allowed. That was a few days of "fun."

ozim2• 11 months ago

Yet still hype leads people to believe in single proprietor billion dollar software companies are just around the corner.

const_cast• 11 months ago

Guys say it with me: vendor your packages! VENDER YOUR PACKAGES!

Ygg2• 11 months ago

Vendor or fork?

kpcyrd• 11 months ago

How about: commit your dependency lockfiles, make sure they use content-addressing cryptographic checksums like Cargo.lock does.

This is also needed for both reproducible builds and SBOMs.

If you commit the actual source code you're making things worse, because it makes coordinated source code review efforts a lot harder. Also patch management with actual vendored source code is terrible.

giancarlostoro2• 11 months ago

And while most people don't prepare for war while choosing their packages, it's not unreasonable for a military to do so. During a war, the ability for people to govern themselves and their own projects often changes dramatically, even in democratic countries. It is entirely routine for countries to require cooperation by the force of law in war time, even the US can and has forced private companies to cooperate with war efforts. This is probably not in the security posture calculation for most of us. But it is for some.

Reading this I'm really hoping the DOD maintains mirrors of GitHub projects that are vital to them.

raxxorraxor• 11 months ago

Still, we had a lot of security issues of people injecting themselves into these one-man projects.

It is ridiculous to force these people to do anything because you were to lazy to build the foundations of your infrastructure yourself, especially if you care about self-reliance.

axelpacheco• 11 months ago

Another case of power law distribution being all around us. I wonder how many commits of the 1M+ downloads projects maintained by more than one person, were done by just one person?

didgetmaster• 11 months ago

Has anyone seen any stats on what happens to a single maintainer project when said person is hit by a bus (or meets some other demise)? With that many data points, there should be enough of them by now to study it.

Is the project taken over by another, single developer? Is it replaced by a similar project? Does it just go away?

gausswho2• 11 months ago

I would love to see a diligently researched episodic series, every episode covering the transition of a popular open-source library/tool/app/site from one maintainer to the next.

And that's why I don't run Netflix.

IAmBroom3• 11 months ago

No, but I would happily pirate that.

ebiester• 11 months ago

I think this is in the realm of a YouTube series. I mean, what's stopping you from doing it?

saadatq• 11 months ago

You should pitch this to David Gelb / whoever is responsible for Chef’s Table on Netflix

ashleyn• 11 months ago

Closest example I could think of would be Hans Reiser/Reiserfs. It's a more sordid story than just getting hit by a bus, though. Ultimately the project just died.

account42• 11 months ago

I don't think this is a good example though as the "sordid" part also made the project toxic for anything that might have otherwise chosen to take it on.

rglover• 11 months ago

I think this is one thing that people fail to consider: if the code is open source, though it may take time to understand, worst case scenario you can just fork it.

nickjj• 11 months ago

Here is one data point.

I bought ASIO Link Pro (software) something like 10 years ago to help route virtual audio devices on my system. The author sadly died and eventually the license key server went offline rendering it unable to start. His nephew looked into it and eventually made the tool free after a year or 2.

I stopped using it after the license server went offline because I still had to record videos. I ended up solving my problem with hardware, but that tool was extremely helpful when I used it for years. It was around $40 at the time. It's one of the few pieces of software I've purchased and felt really happy about it.

oblongdefeat• 11 months ago

Not sure if you know or not, or if it matters anymore, but someone eventually made a fix for this.

https://github.com/DirkoAudio/ASIOLinkProFIX

I've been using it for over a year on Windows 10 and it works great.

codazoda• 11 months ago

I suspect this is the case for the majority of open source software. I have a handful of tiny projects. I don't think anyone will keep them alive after I die. But I guess we should make a distinction based on popularity or something. My top four projects have only 675, 363, 122, and 96 stars.

jampa• 11 months ago

Unless something changes in the underlying infrastructure, most packages don't need active maintenance after achieving their objective.

If there is a major change (e.g., Python 3, React Native new arch), they are replaced/forked.

kqr• 11 months ago

The ones that come to mind are

- Hans Reiser, maintainer of ReiserFS. I think very few people use ReiserFS these days.

- Ian Murdock, creator of the Debian distribution. Debian lives on, but the project was also set up specifically to distribute maintenance.

- Jim Weirich, creator of the Rake build tool. I'm not a Rubyist so I don't know how it was affected, but I assume it's such a big part of Ruby other people took over.

- Peter Hintjens, co-creator of ZeroMQ. From what I understand, Hintjens was never the main developer but an active promoter. The project lives on as far as I know.

- Terry Davis, creator of TempleOS. I think development on TempleOS stopped.

drob518• 11 months ago

IMO, it has a lot to do with usage and the availability of alternatives. With ReiserFS, there were a lot of alternatives, both available at the time or announced shortly. While ReiserFS pioneered a lot of ideas, many of them showed up in alternatives fairly quickly. TempleOS is had a pretty limited user base.

I’ve seen many projects in the Clojure ecosystem get picked up and maintained by other folks. The key was always that the projects had an established user base of some notable size and something distinctive about them that made switching to other alternatives less desirable than continuing to push forward with a new and possibly more mundane maintainer and feature schedule. I’ve also seen a lot of “abandonware.”

So, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

bitwize• 11 months ago

Reiserfs died because alternatives, like ext3/ext4 and btrfs, became readily available.

TempleOS has a fork called ZealOS. Terry Davis really was the "Wesley Willis of programming", and he had friends and fans worldwide, some of whom have taken up TempleOS development under the ZealOS banner.

kube-system12• 11 months ago

I don't know about any broader statistics, but in my personal experience, I see all three of those. I think it's mostly a function of how large the user base is, how complicated the code base is, and whether or not there are any substitutes.

thayne• 11 months ago

It depends. More common than getting hit by a bus is that the maintainer loses interest, or doesn't have the time to put into it anymore. When that happens I've seen all of the following happen:

* Someone forks the project, and eventually the fork replaces the original

* Another, possibly new, project that fills the same niche becomes more popular, and eventually replaces most usages of the first project.

* The original maintainer hands off maintenance to someone else.

* People keep using it, even though it is no longer maintained, and maybe make their own forks to fix issues they have, but none of the forks really catch on

One of the strengths of OSS is that if the developer disappears, or goes rogue, or changes the license terms, someone can fork the project and keep it going. With proprietary software, if the company (or individual) who makes it disappears, or decides to discontinue it, or change the terms to something unacceptable, you are just out of luck. Hopefully, you can find a competing product that meets your needs.

worik2• 11 months ago

This is theory

tracker18• 11 months ago

Definitely seen this a lot in the JS/NPM ecosystem... You go searching for a module that does $thing... you find about 10, you sort and look at say the 3 most recently published an the 3-5 most downloaded/popular... is the repo open (github, usually), are there a lot of old issues left lingering with an old last publish date? Might take a passive look at the codebase to see if I can grok it and fix any issues I find if needed.

Choose what I feel is the best option. Trying to avoid dead packages, but not afraid to deal with older packages if they aren't just stale, but functionally complete. The shift towards ES import statements and TypeScript defs has also influenced my selection process.

I've seen plenty of cases where either a fork or new option effectively takes over. A lot of people are leaning towards Zod over Yue or Hono over Express. There's instances where the dev goes off the rails like with Faker and the community comes together to fork a solution.

All of the above examples definitely happen in practice. I'm guessing many packages all over the place have replaced various dependencies over the years.

popalchemist• 11 months ago

If it's open-source, and the original breaks for any reason, it's typically forked and continues life. See: Redis (recently).

qn9n• 11 months ago

When Bram passed away Vim was passed on to the core maintainers there.

andai2• 11 months ago

Open Source is just a guy, and The Internet is just his computer.

andai2• 11 months ago

It’s not until I change downloads to 1 billion downloads that we see 1 package maintained by 1 person, and 9 packages maintained by more than 1.

Which one is that?

dzonga• 11 months ago

the west or those with largely liberal viewpoints who think in black and white vs seeing the world as grey are gonna cost the west a lot.

we already saw this - with 'cancel' mafia.

because russia or i.e putin invaded ukraine doesn't mean the whole russia is bad. or you shouldn't interact with russia at all. no one stopped interacting with usa after they invaded iraq.

just because russia doesn't give a shit about lgbtq rights doesn't mean russia is a bad country. likewise just because china runs an explicit authoritarian system - it doesn't mean its a country - china bad.

trump and his idiotic gvt kinda recognize this - but they're also doing it the wrong way.

anyways - trade with enemies / friends alike as long as they're benefits to be realized.

lern_too_spel• 11 months ago

You are not familiar with how Putin thinks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

mikeytown2• 11 months ago

Drupal isn't one person last time I checked; but yes this is correct for almost all projects

ivanjermakov• 11 months ago

Too bad the notion of completed/finished/done software is very weak. In theory, there it nothing wrong with an OSS project made by one person.

I would like to see the LOC these one-person projects with >1M downloads have. I suspect most of these are a simple Node/browser/OS API single-file wrappers that are simple to get right and treat it as complete.

At the same time such projects are easy to verify upon adding as dependency. Lately, I've just copy-pasted relevant parts of a library to my project because adding it as a dependency has a cost. I doubt this is a common practice though, especially in NPM land.

tracker18• 11 months ago

I think it can go both ways... I've definitely copied code into a project more than once. I've also directly written the following line of code into a lot of places, just because of import overhead and convenience when needed.

    const sleep = (ms) => new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, ms));

I also with push for just straight SVG with JSX instead of the massive charting libraries everyone seems to bring in... similar when I seem moment.js ... I don't know why more people don't generate/refer to the resource usage outputs. If anything comes close to the base React or MUI libraries, it gets yanked if at all possible. Or at LEAST load it async and only where necessary.

sgbeal• 11 months ago

Too bad the notion of completed/finished/done software is very weak.

FWLIW, this simple definition suffices for me: software is complete insofar as it requires no changes to do what its maintainers would like to do with it at the current point in time.

"Complete" software frequently changes to "incomplete" as the desires of the maintainer(s) change(s), and may just as quickly revert to "complete" as changes are made.

This definition does not consider the desires of non-maintainers because there's _always_ at least one such person who wants a given pieces of software to do their one weird thing (which the maintainer(s) will not ever add).

ozim2• 11 months ago

After reading. For a person that calls out how people are not smart the author takes quite of mental shortcuts to make his point work.

NPM downloads are not equal to amount of projects as people plug in their CI/CD to download package on each build.

Then assuming just by sheer number that there must be something critical in the set or at least super important. Without putting effort to track at least one in some way.

That’s at least lazy especially if you call people „smart”. Then throw up some numbers thinking you’re the smart one.

lofaszvanitt• 11 months ago

"Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars (also a big number)."

Yeah, but the maintainer almost never sees anything from it. And most of the people cannot monetize oss based projects, because they don't have the expertise for it.

OSS is the biggest farce ever. Same when people say patents are evil. Ridiculous. A handful of people spoon fed this universal bullshite to people and they believed it.

Remember people that proper governments plan tens of years ahead. In this context, OSS was first, so AI systems would have ample source code to be trained on.

phkahler• 11 months ago

Most the stuff on github is something one person wrote, stuck on there, and nobody uses. Then there's a bunch of things that are one person, but some small number of people use or have used it. Most big OSS programs have more than one person behind them. The vulnerable things tend to be dependencies of larger projects - small, but useful enough to get used in larger things.

mathisd• 11 months ago

The visualisations could be improved by binning number of maintainer 1 / 2-10 / 11-n or by plotting cumulative distribution (ie. x% of projects have less than y contributors)

tracker18• 11 months ago

Even that would be mis-representative... I know of many packages with contributions from hundreds of people, but the bulk of the work was still 1 or 2 primary maintainers based on commits.

firesteelrain3• 11 months ago

I can see how the article seemed like an advertisement for Hunted Labs. I have talked to them and it’s a good product especially if you care about where you are getting your software from as part of a supply chain analysis.

pabs34• 11 months ago

It seemed like an advertisement for the incompetence of Hunted Labs to me, from them:

"This serves as another powerful reminder that knowing who writes your code is just as critical as understanding what the code does"

If who wrote some code matters to you, then your supply chain management is simply insufficient.

firesteelrain3• 11 months ago

If who wrote some code matters to you, then your supply chain management is simply insufficient.

I am not following. Source country is absolutely a thing when certain industries look at open source. That’s what Hunted Labs does

BobbyTables2• 11 months ago

I wonder. A lot of single person GitHub projects are just people’s “hello world” or other personal experiments. Single file webserver written without “if statements” or other absurdity.

Not sure about NPM but a lot of PyPI projects are likely similar. Just now I hit “browse projects” and got this: https://pypi.org/project/helloworld-eduardo/

Nobody even extremely drunk would even think of using that stuff in a product…

johneth• 11 months ago

Just FYI: I got a modal in Chrome asking "Did you mean opensource.google? Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making hard-to-see changes to the web address."

I'm sure there's nothing you can do about it, but thought you might want to know.

giancarlostoro2• 11 months ago

Reminds me of what was it... Heartbleed? Then everyone realized its a library mostly maintained by one underfunded developer? Critical piece of software, underfunded.

voidmain• 11 months ago

They stopped before looking at the number of commits by person in the projects with multiple maintainers. I would guess that makes the picture even bleaker.

Open Source is one person

Related Stories