You had me until the anecdote. I understand the sentiment and intent of what’s being said, but as a security professional it just paints themselves, their applications, and their user base as targets. Knowing it’s a won’t fix means it’s also easier to sell exploits if not disclosing as it’s clear he doesn’t intend to upgrade to a maintained and supported version of Python, so it should work for longer than most exploits.
If you use the program its plainly obvious this kind of opinion is well spread through it. Of course I deeply respect anyone who puts their work out for free as FOSS but the tool is not a shining example of good software.
+1 for Calibre. It is such a wonder of software to me. I respected his reasoning though as another commenter has observed [1], it seemed inevitable that they would have to migrate at some point.
It's kinda natural evolution. It started with "just a KV store with few extras" and just grew more and more and more extras over time. It's "... and the kitchen sink" of databases.
SQLite by D. Richard Hipp also still maintains it by himself
I guess Linux kernel could also be considered still being maintained by a single person even though it's mostly contributions from other people, don't know the rules
It fixes one of my main issue with macOS, its inability to show a calendar by clicking on the day in status bar, and adds tons of great feature without feeling bloaty. Great great job. Thank you Sindre Sorhus for making my life easier !
Wondered that nobody mentioned Latex.
I didn't look at the source code, but Laslie Lamport said he would pay a price (1000 USD?) for every error detected, and AFAIR he never had to pay a single dime. So the code should be qualifying for 'excellent'.
Use it daily to take notes in lessons, never had any issues with it and he fixes stuff really fast compared to other similar sized projects (in my experience).
Before that i used xournal++ but rnote feels more stable/modern but lacks some features that xournal++ has
Thats a nice way to think about it. Perhaps we have more control these days and less choice.
He was also lucky enough to have a supportive family. After repeated trials of forced treatment all agreed that it was not tenable indefinitely.
At the time he passed there was an assumption he'd been killed. He would call people who he felt persecuted him, simply walking by him was enough, the N-word. Many buttock clenching a moment caught on his livestreams.
In the end it was likely an accident with him living around train tracks.
Minecraft (actually 2 people?), rollercoaster tycoon (written in assembly), the first version of the Facebook, ape (a plasmid editor), Stardew valley, onward VR(??).
Minecraft is some excellent game design, but the code quality of early versions (back when it was only two people) is lacking. They did call it beta and alpha so it's not like they were claiming any different.
I'm not sure about "a single person" but I believe Flask and Requests (both Python libraries) are/were at least strongly connected to a single 'creator' (Armin Ronacher and Kenneth Reitz respectively) that come to mind for me, though both have larger communities of contributors these days.
The Acorn image editor for macOS by Gus Mueller is shockingly polished for a one-person project. I use it all the time. In my few times interacting with him through support he’s been really kind as well.
There are few things I lament more than having to spin up on a new serialization / file format and it isn't using Capnproto or Protobufs or some similar invention. Capnproto has truly spoiled me in terms of how consistent and feature rich it is for what seems like a "simple" task.
The initial version was. Linus however handed over the maintainer role very early on after the initial release and hasn't had much to with the active development of git for years.
Loren Brichter’s iOS word game, Letterpress, was a one-person tour de force. Not only did he do the sound effects himself, but he apparently bypassed UIKit entirely using OpenGL calls. Kinda crazy, but then again he was on the original iPhone team…
LnS: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/why-did-you-buy-look... (perfect stealth) + the ability to block at the level of every dll run by svhost till windows 7 - then the author disappear and no solution like that anymore (it used TDI removed after windows 8).
There are so many. MIDIBox by Thorsten Klose is great. Open source hardware and software. There are a ton of projects based on it. I am not sure what the level of other contributors are now, but it was mostly or all Thorsten back when I was looking at it 10-15 years ago.
Quentin Zervaas is the creator of the Streaks habit-tracking app (https://streaksapp.com), which I find to be excellent and extremely well thought-out. I’m not sure if he’s still working independently or has a team.
> Cockos currently has two programmers.[5] Justin Frankel, the company founder, probably best known for his work on the Winamp media player application, and John Schwartz, who joined Cockos in 2008 and is the author of many audio plug-ins, notably a virtual analogue synthesizer called Olga. Christophe Thibault, an old colleague of Frankel's from his Nullsoft days, was a Cockos employee between 2005-2014.
I last used it more than a decade ago, but Pegasus Mail by David Harris was my MUA for more than a decade before that: https://www.pmail.com. Surprisingly it seems to be still alive even today.
https://beta.f1mv.com/ as it's enhanced the experience for F1 for me. Built by a single dev and better than anything F1 management has released as official clients.
qmail/djbdns written by Dan Bernstein were groundbreaking when released, and are extremely interesting in terms of how to build and design robust software to be deployed in a security-critical hostile environment
Woz wrote all the Apple I and II software.
Cave Story, a metroidvania still actively ported to new platforms today.
Doom had a very small team, Carmack doing most/all of the engine work.
Dwarf Fortress is by two developers, and simulates its environment down to a very precise level of detail.
Many more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u4pn/what_suc...