Furthermore, “RUNK” was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s.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.

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.

Is-even and is-odd on npm.

For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.

Runk means masturbation in Icelandic so that adds another layer of hilarity to this

is-number

Numpy

Imagemagick.

Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.

Another one is OpenSSL.

The world is built on is-even and is-odd!

left-pad was the first thing that came to mind for me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

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.

Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html

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.

I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™

A few libraries come to mind immediately: fftw (I think the most widely used fft library) or GMP (I think the most used multi precision library).

Is-even 😤