Ask HN: Who are some unsung heroes in open source that need more support? - notaplumber
======
koala_man
All the wonderful people who package software for their distro!

We take for granted the ability to install anything via our package managers,
but it's made possible by efforts of a vast number of contributors who often
just like a piece of software and stepped up to allow everyone else to use it
too. Too often they get zero recognition for their efforts.

I'm doubly grateful because I'm also an upstream maintainer who doesn't have
to try to keep up with all the various packaging processes.

If you want to support them, the next time some software is unavailable or
lagging behind in your distro, see what you can do to help!

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but am I the only one who
thinks of these people's efforts as a huge amount of wasted time? Why should
_anyone_ have to package software aside from the developer who made it? Why
should it have to be done for so many different package repositories and
packaging formats? Why are people ok this?

~~~
kosma
Because the software is inconsistent (and thus buggy) in that regard. Also,
barely any developer possesses the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to
build their software for dozens of arcane architectures.

Packagers create the glue between the software (which is heterogeneous) and
the distro (which is internally consistent). The world without this glue is a
horrible mess and a huge waste of time; the old Slackware is a good example.
It's thanks to the distro makers that you don't have to spend days collecting
requirements and acquiring arcane knowledge just to install a piece of
software.

So: yes, those people devote a huge amount of time - so the countless users
around the world don't have to. The net time value is positive.

~~~
probonopd
I think we need to distinguish between software that is used as a component in
a larger system (e.g., the core OS for which is the core business of a
distribution), and an application that is not part of the larger system
(distribution) but merely runs on top of it. For putting together a
distribution (with tightly integrated components) the traditional packaging
philosophy is probably very well suited For add-on third-party software that
is not an integral part of the distribution but merely wants to run on it, not
so much.

An independent software author (e.g., Ultimaker or Prusa) just wants to reach
all "Linux" users at once without dealing with different distribution's
policies, and without needing to use the same version of e.g., Qt, that
happens to be in a given distribution. And as a user of their software, I want
their software on my "Linux" system in the same moment Windows and macOS users
can have it.

------
aaronarduino
Paul Davis of the Ardour project. Ardour is probably one of the best digital
audio workstations ever made. Sad thing is that Ardour is such niche software
that it doesn't get as much monetary support as it should.

[https://ardour.org/](https://ardour.org/)

~~~
j45
Wow. Am I missing something or is Ardour a more capable kind of Audacity?

~~~
dvirsky
It's light years beyond it, it's a full fledged digital audio workstation
capable of high quality studio recordings and mixing. A good analogy would be
Paint vs. Photoshop.

EDIT: Not to downplay Audacity which is also awesome, it's just not meant for
the same use case.

~~~
j45
Nice, and free. I think my podcasting friends may like this.

------
georgecalm
Consider supporting Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel. Henry decided to
dedicate himself 100% to open-source earlier this year and is one of the main
reasons Babel is such an indispensable (albeit invisible) tool. Henry welcomes
contributions at
[https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu/memberships](https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu/memberships)

~~~
FLGMwt
Babel has some crazy throughput going through it to drive a massive percentage
of the modern web. Wild to see how low the funding is.

~~~
swyx
seriously. its insane that some startups are raising VC money that 100% would
not be able to exist without Babel being maintained. Some of that money should
go to Babel but won't. How do we fix this so that Henry doesnt have to keep
begging? It's really broken.

------
sheetjs
Start from the projects you are using. You might find that many of them are
primarily one-man efforts and could use some support.

For example, we use verdaccio
([https://www.verdaccio.org/](https://www.verdaccio.org/)) as a private NPM
server. IT was so mindblowingly simple to get a private server working that,
when the opportunity presented itself, we felt compelled to donate:
[https://opencollective.com/verdaccio](https://opencollective.com/verdaccio)

In this case, it seems that there was an older abandoned effort (sinopia) and
the original developer Alex Kocharin
([https://github.com/rlidwka](https://github.com/rlidwka)) stopped. Juan
Picado ([https://github.com/juanpicado](https://github.com/juanpicado)) picked
up the mantle and given how NPM is moving fast and breaking things it's great
to see someone is keeping up with the open source solution.

------
toufka
The people building MicroManger (and ImageJ) - the (best/only/reasonable) open
source software capable of driving most microscopes used in biology - and then
processing that data. It's raw, it's complicated, and (non-technical,
demanding, one-off) biologists are the end users. But piped through that
software is most every piece of live/functional raw data used in all your
cancer/genetics/genomics research. It's also a core to many other downstream,
forked, or scripted sets of machine-control, and data-processing. It's a
thankless job that literally drives humanity forward.

[https://micro-manager.org/wiki/Micro-Manager](https://micro-
manager.org/wiki/Micro-Manager)

Nico Sturman used to be one of the project leads, but it's been a while since
I've kept up with who runs it now.

------
dbrgn
Urban from LibrePCB, who has been developing a free/libre EDA suite (for PCB
design) mostly by himself for over 4 years now:
[http://librepcb.org/](http://librepcb.org/) The first release will hopefully
be out this year.

If you think a FOSS KiCAD "competitor" with a solid and well thought-out
library design and good usability should be supported, then check out his
Patreon page (or his BTC address). Or – of course – contribute code.

Here you can find a LibrePCB introduction video from this year's FOSDEM:
[https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/)

 _(Edit: Punctuation)_

~~~
cbHXBY1D
Interesting! I'm a KiCAD user but have never heard of this. Why doesn't Urban
just contribute to KiCAD instead of maintaining a separate open source
project?

Apologies if he mentions it in the video -- I'm at work.

~~~
phkahler
>> Why doesn't Urban just contribute to KiCAD instead of maintaining a
separate open source project?

Not every open source project is built the way a person thinks it should be.
The only way to know if an alternate viewpoint is better is to build it and
find out. Other times a person just wants to build it for themselves for their
own reasons. Either way, variety can be a good thing. One day an alternative
may just replace your favorite piece of software and then you might ask why
the creator started from so far behind all those years ago...

There are probably as many reasons as there are developers.

~~~
cbHXBY1D
Do you know anything about this project or is this just a generic diatribe?

I was hoping to hear about his opinions of the shortcomings of KiCAD and where
LibrePCB improves on them. It would certainly help someone like me decide
whether to fund him on Patreon or not, seeing as I've donated to CERN for
KiCAD development.

Edit: I've found his reasons in his slides -
[https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/atta...](https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/attachments/slides/2267/export/events/attachments/cad_librepcb/slides/2267/librepcb_slides.pdf)

------
nategri
As of a couple years ago development of ntp was largely performed by one
Harlan Stenn. He (and the funding issues around ntp) made the news a while
back, but the guy probably deserves even _more_ visibility, given the crucial
nature of his work.

2015 article: [https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-
and...](https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-and-an-
uncertain-future-readers-react/d/d-id/1319521)

~~~
robertk
Notoriety means infamy, or the state of being well known for something
terrible. Did you mean a different word?

~~~
nkkollaw
Really? I didn't know that,in Italian it a similar word translates into
"famous". I wonder how many times I've used it incorrectly...

~~~
cperciva
"Notorious" does mean "famous", but it carries the added implication of being
famous for being bad. I suspect the meaning has changed over time, just like
"awful" used to mean "awe-inspiring".

~~~
wafflesindeed
I think you mean awesome? Or have I been wrong all along?

~~~
cperciva
"Awesome" _still_ carries a positive meaning. "Awful" changed from being a
synonym for "wonderful" to a synonym for "terrible".

------
sldenazis
Ornicar[0], author of lila[1], the chess server behind the greatest chess site
of internet[2].

[0] [https://github.com/ornicar](https://github.com/ornicar) [1]
[https://github.com/ornicar/lila/](https://github.com/ornicar/lila/) [2]
[https://lichess.org/](https://lichess.org/)

------
ravenstine
Jonathan Thomas over at Openshot Video Editor:

[https://www.openshot.org/](https://www.openshot.org/)

It's had its share of bugs, but the amount of work he has put into it over the
years is pretty incredible. Most other video editors for Linux don't even come
close, and it recaptures a lot of the lost glory of Windows Movie Maker before
it was rewritten and made ugly.

~~~
bufferoverflow
Davinci Resolve blows everything else out of the water, and it's free.
Available for Linux, Win, Mac.

~~~
ravenstine
Not open source. There's nothing wrong with that, except it's not what we're
talking about here.

------
tvlooy
OpenBSD is heavily underfunded compared to what value they deliver. See
[https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html](https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html)

------
neom
Jen Fong-Adwent, Jeff Lindsay, Dominic Tarr, James Halliday and Ben Lupton are
the five I really admire and think their ideas don't get enough exposure (I
realize they've all had successful projects but talking to them at length
their ideas generally speaking are fantastic and should be encouraged).

[https://github.com/ednapiranha](https://github.com/ednapiranha)
[https://github.com/progrium](https://github.com/progrium)
[https://github.com/dominictarr](https://github.com/dominictarr)

[https://github.com/substack](https://github.com/substack)
[https://github.com/balupton](https://github.com/balupton)

------
brynet
With my OpenBSD developer hat on, hardware donations welcome here too:
[https://www.openbsd.org/want.html](https://www.openbsd.org/want.html)

 _cough_ \-- I also very much like pizza:
[https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html](https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html)

~~~
busterarm
> cough-- I also very much like pizza:
> [https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html](https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html)

But is it Pizza Pizza?

~~~
brynet
I'll eat Pizza from anywhere! Even Pizza Pizza.

------
mrburton
Shay Banon - Founder of Elastic Search. He's been in the Open Source space for
years building frameworks like Compass which influenced Red Hat to build
Hibernate Search. He's done other work as well.

Ross Mason - Founder of Mule Soft. He built Mule which is Open Source and
helped many companies better integrate services.

Joe Walnes - Joe is a beast. He's contributed and created many Open Source
projects. websocketd, smoothie, xstream, webbit, and many more.

Rick Hightower - A very smart guy who use to blog about technology that helped
many many people. He also created Boon a JSON parser, qbit, and many other
frameworks. Because of all of his hard work, he was also made a Java Champion.

I could name so many more folks. Honestly, it's amazing not more people are
acknowledged for their efforts.

------
willow9886
My partner Mike Schwartz founded Gluu because he was tired of recommending
proprietary access management platforms like Siteminder and IBM Tivoli that
were locked behind six figure licenses.

We're now a team of about 30 people with 10 years of development into the Gluu
Server, a free open source software platform for SSO, 2FA, access management:

[https://gluu.org/docs/ce](https://gluu.org/docs/ce)

~~~
ljw1001
Ironically, the reason there are so many unsung heroes of open-source is
precisely because their products are not "locked behind" expensive licenses.

It sounds though like this is, in fact, a commercial venture.

------
dualbus
Chet Ramey.

He is the maintainer of the GNU Bash shell and of the GNU Readline line-
editing library.

* [https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/](https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/)

* [https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...](https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-week/chet-ramey-geek-of-the-week/)

------
blzaugg
Jon Neal[0]

You can thank him for: normalize.css[1], sanitize.css, SVG4Everybody, HTML5
Shiv[4], and the yayQuery Podcast theme music[5]. And many more[6][7].

[0] [http://jonathantneal.github.io/](http://jonathantneal.github.io/) [1]
[http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-
css/#overview](http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/#overview) [2]
[https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css](https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css)
[3]
[https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody](https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody)
[4] [https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at-
no...](https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at-now) [5]
[https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery](https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery)
[6] [https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss-
plugins/blob/maste...](https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss-
plugins/blob/master/docs/authors.md) [7]
[https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal](https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal)

~~~
TAForObvReasons
The html5shiv was originally based on a discovery by
[https://twitter.com/sjoerd_visscher](https://twitter.com/sjoerd_visscher) and
represents a iterative process involving many developers, at least according
to Paul Irish [https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the-
html5-shiv...](https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the-html5-shiv/)

------
sam0x17
Chris Hobbs / RX14 (major crystal language contributor) is 17 years old, is a
genius, and is behind a lot of the recent work on the language including
windows support, parallelism, and other things. You can follow him on GitHub
or watch him work on crystal on twitch:

[https://github.com/rx14](https://github.com/rx14) |
[https://www.twitch.tv/rx14](https://www.twitch.tv/rx14)

------
petrohi
Loïc Hoguin. The author of Cowboy web server. De facto standard web server in
Erlang/Elixir. Foundation for Plug and Phoenix frameworks.

------
makx
Shotcut Video Editor: [https://shotcut.org/](https://shotcut.org/)

\- and -

Natron video compositing software: [https://natron.fr/](https://natron.fr/)

Both are great tools with a steady stream of updates.

------
inspector14
SparkleShare / Hylke Bons

An amazing self-hosted cross platform file syncing/sharing service. Being
based on git allows for (somewhat) unlimited version history. Simple and
elegant, really surprised more people don't know about it.

------
BerislavLopac
Ben Darnell of Tornado and Mike Bayer (aka zzzeek) of SQLAlchemy.

~~~
zzzeek
thanks! I was even going to post myself (SQLAlchemy). However our deepest
areas of need are the most boring and soul crushing - documentation and bug
triaging. Ideally someone else with full push / release access other than me.
We get lots of great patches and pull requests but I'm the only one moving it
all through. I'm probably not easy to work with (but I'm open to improvement!)

------
kondro
Consider supporting George Nachman, creator of iTerm2 over at
[https://www.patreon.com/gnachman](https://www.patreon.com/gnachman).

iTerm2 seems to be the favourite terminal of macOS users… at least those that
spend a large amount of their time there (especially with its native tmux
support).

------
warp
Joey Hess:

\- [https://liberapay.com/joeyh/](https://liberapay.com/joeyh/) \-
[https://www.patreon.com/joeyh/overview](https://www.patreon.com/joeyh/overview)

(I support Joey on patreon, as I use git-annex quite a bit)

------
nagVenkat
Please support GNU Octave if you can.

~~~
fiveFeet
I used to be a big fan of octave until I learned python + numpy + pandas
dataframes. After that I did not have much need for octave.

~~~
poster123
There are a lot of engineers and financial quants using Matlab, and the Octave
project makes a lot of that Matlab code usable without an expensive Matlab
license.

~~~
ljw1001
I guess it's not clear to me why (at least in the 'first world') it's wrong
for quants and engineers to pay something for the tools they use. (i have
spent a fair amount of time contributing to open-source, so I've no problem
with OS generally, but I also don't think their is anything wrong with the
folks at Matlab getting paid for their efforts. Quants are sure as hell
getting paid for theirs).

~~~
poster123
I agree that Matlab has a right to be paid for its product, but it is still
nice to have a free alternative.

~~~
ljw1001
The better the free software, the greater the exploitation by other people
making a bunch of money on it, while the devs work nights and weekends for
nothing. I don't have a solution, but there it is.

------
nunez
That dude that maintains jq. For those that haven't used it, it's like grep
but for JSON (and about as fast).

------
porsager
The ones that undeterred maintains software they haven't built themselves. For
instance the maintainers of Mithril.js (pygy, tivac, isiahmeadows) is/has been
doing great work for a long time, with nothing in return. There are many like
them out there on other projects, I'm sure, who doesn't get the thanks that
they deserve.

~~~
panoply
Don’t sell yourself short porsager, you’re apart of that finely tuned Mithril
machine too.

------
dvirsky
A guy called Alexey Tulinov maintains an excellent but very little known,
light-weight unicode processing library called libnu. I really wish it had
more recognition:
[https://bitbucket.org/alekseyt/nunicode](https://bitbucket.org/alekseyt/nunicode)

~~~
dvirsky
Two other FOSS projects I like but are not super known:

* Calf: A small group of devs producing a set of high quality audio processing plugins. [https://calf-studio-gear.org/](https://calf-studio-gear.org/)

* Ardour - pretty well known I think, but only in the narrow cross-section of audio geeks and Linux geeks. [https://ardour.org/](https://ardour.org/)

 _

------
reeme
Serge Rider - DBeaver - the best open source multi database accesa tool.
[https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver](https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver) .
Daily commits, almost a one man show!

~~~
sandebert
That's an app I use daily. A couple of years back I tried to send him some
money, as a way of showing appreciation for his work. He wasn't interested so
I kind of assumed money wasn't an issue for him.

------
zacharycarter
Araq and the other Nim core developers.

OpenBSD core developers.

------
electricslpnsld
Gael Guennebaud. The Eigen library powers tons of numerical heavy code --
including Tensorflow -- but doesn't get much spotlight. Watching Eigen evolve
under Gael's stewardship has been amazing.

------
bckmn
There's an NPM package started for this:
[https://github.com/feross/thanks](https://github.com/feross/thanks)

------
mabynogy
Terry A. Davis who is homeless at the moment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS)

[http://www.templeos.org/](http://www.templeos.org/)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-
uIA55UI47_cXg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg)

------
threeseed
Sébastien Doeraene (srd) and David Barri (japgolly).

Former built almost all of ScalaJS and the latter built ScalaJS-React.

It's inspired a lot of KotlinJS as well.

------
justinclift
Definitely the DB Browser for SQLite team (sqlitebrowser.org). :)

We recently created a Patron account, if that helps:

[https://www.patreon.com/db4s](https://www.patreon.com/db4s)

------
kartiksura
RIBS2 (Robust Infrastructure for Backend Systems, ver. 2)
[https://github.com/Adaptv/ribs2](https://github.com/Adaptv/ribs2)

Great framework to build highly scalable, low latency service (developer
friendly). It would be great some detailed tutorials and documentation about
its internals.

------
phkahler
Jonathan Westhues, author of Solvespace. There are a number of hard things to
implement in that code and he did them all initially. Others have been making
good contributions too, but it could use more developers. I've been digging in
the code myself but have not made a pull request yet. We shall see...

------
voltagex_
Anyone who makes sure stuff compiles and runs on Windows.

~~~
JdeBP
Is there anyone at Microsoft that you would like to especially single out? (-:

~~~
voltagex_
I actually wasn't thinking about Microsoft in particular when I wrote this.

Git for Windows, Audacity, Python are all good examples where people have put
in a _lot_ of work.

On the Microsoft side, whoever's porting OpenSSH is pretty awesome, too.

------
settings11
Fabrice Bellard.. He is already popular a bit... But most don't know about
him....

------
haddadda
openmhealth.org - we're build an open data standard for mobile health data.

------
notatoad
PSA: nominating yourself in threads like this is pretty tactless.

~~~
ljw1001
Calling people tactless after they've worked their asses off building
something they give to strangers for free is more tactless.

------
rajeshbatralive
[https://github.com/wajahatkarim3](https://github.com/wajahatkarim3)

~~~
sattoshi
Who is he?

~~~
rajeshbatra
he call himself Wantrepreneur, [https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap-
Android](https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap-Android)

