347
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Redkey@programming.dev 8 points 8 months ago

That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would've been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.

What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn't see a single person saying, "How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?", even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, "How can we wrest this code out of this guy's hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I'm too busy) so we don't have a single point of failure?"

[-] kurwa@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

Well obviously giving financial support is important, but having more than 1 maintainer is good too. Because any amount of money wouldn't have stopped him from going to the hospital / jail, and certainly wouldn't help if he got hit by a bus.

this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
347 points (97.8% liked)

Programming

17290 readers
198 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS