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Many moons ago I did a project at uni where we implemented elliptic curve cryptography in Java and released it as open source. Unsurprisingly, we had no idea what we were doing. Some years later I get a random mail from someone using it on some embedded system…
I don’t want to know, and I fear that ist is paramount that I maintain plausible deniability 😂♥️🙏
What are being referenced here?
one morning my wife and I were talking about Penis Pumps. Then I left for work, got annoyed with managing how many different AWS account credentials I had to manage in my dev-box terminal, and wrote a script to manage it for me.
I named my script PPump because lmao. My team lead saw me use it one day, logged into my dev-box and took the script and published it to our internal GitLab without knowing why I named it PPump.
Now one year later our entire office has PPump baked into the default devbox image. Every day people penis pump into their AWS accounts. They have no idea and I can’t ever say anything about it.
Anyway this meme speaks to me in primordial ways.
Honestly, this could be referring to most open-source projects. I’d imagine many of the popular ones were originally made to solve a problem for themselves and then everyone jumps onboard with that solution.
Linux itself also kinda fits here considering it was meant to just sort of be a small project in the beginning and I doubt Linus ever could have predicted what it became.
I have a tiny php library for a somewhat popular framework. It was made so a company could protect a very old database and certain tables. It started as a one off 9 years ago. It was one php file of less than 50 lines.
As of this month it has been downloaded 2 million times. I still can’t believe its been used this much. And I’m the only maintainer. If I wanted to I could ruin a lot of peoples days. But I won’t.
In a couple of decades, we are going to have large swaths of code that will outlive its creators being used on essential infrastructure.
“most” is a bit strong. Many open source projects never get users or any kind of traction, they’re just a passion project for the author. The lucky few fill a need and take off. Review the package usage count on npm or the GitHub stars for projects - there’s a tiny fraction that make it big.
Considering that making it big just means a lot of responsibility, angry messages, AI-driven bug reports and still no pay, I wouldn’t call them lucky.
I would, sarcastically.
