This is so true tho
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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They are real people
XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
When I last talked to Richard he had company to work on SQLite. It was like four people.
SQLite is still deployed on everything, everywhere. You browser. Your phone. Macs. Half of Linux machine. Your airplane. It's super impressive.
Also interesting is that it's one of the small number of unquestionably public domain pieces of software. Not open source, but public domain. It's not entirely clear if you can technically put your own work in the public domain, or if you're just freely licensing it to anyone.
Sqlite was initially developed for the US military though, which explicitly makes it public domain.
It doesn't matter, but it's interesting.
It's lite architecture makes it the only valid option to not having to deploy a full on postgre
I mean, what's the alternative aside from spinning up a MariaDB for your small local app? I can still remember the swamp of .ini files some older programs used for this or the totally overblown Windows Registry. Not a good time.
CSV or a spreadsheet (xlsx/ods)?
You didnt specify it had to be a good optio ;)
Pretty sure lots of projects use json files, before that it was probably XML. Are those good or even decent alternatives? Probably depends on the amount of data ...
db.txt
Fatfs is also a big one iirc
While those are the main developers neither is alone in maintaining their respective software.
Probably gonna get really bad once AI actors start combing the internet for exploits on a larger scale.
Start??
Also gonna get really bad once these lonely maintainers get into AI. Been browsing https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware, things looks pretty bleak.