Open Source is one person

(opensourcesecurity.io)

433 points LawnGnome | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 01:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source

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didgetmaster ◴[28 Aug 25 14:11 UTC] No.45052400[source]▶

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?

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kqr ◴[28 Aug 25 17:56 UTC] No.45055027[source]▶

>>45052400 #

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.

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1. bitwize ◴[29 Aug 25 12:09 UTC] No.45062993[source]▶

>>45055027 #

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.

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