Every alarm, boarding pass and calendar invite on your phone depends on a text file holding every clock rule a government has ever announced. UCLA lecturer Paul Eggert keeps it current in his spare time, and at least four billion Android phones and iPhones read it. He is an open source maintainer, and he is far from the only one in that position.
A Redditor posting as u/Mastbubbles tested how close the famous xkcd 2347 image of infrastructure balanced on one small block is to the truth. They downloaded the full history of 23 projects that phones, browsers and servers rely on, counted everyone who made ten or more changes in the past year, and published the results on sheets.works as The People Holding Up the Internet. The post collected about 1,100 upvotes on r/linux in its first day. Eleven of the 23 projects had one or two people doing the regular work.
Key findings: xz has a single regular contributor, Lasse Collin, who wrote 97 percent of its changes in 2025. The analysis found no new funding after the 2024 backdoor. sudo had 5,408 of its 5,409 changes from 2008 to 2018 come from one person, Todd Miller. Eight projects, including the time zone database, SQLite, zlib, xz and bash, show no grant or sponsorship in any public funding source.
Money follows disasters. Within two months of Heartbleed in 2014 the Linux Foundation had raised $5.4 million, and Open SSL, which lived on about $2,000 a year in donations, got paid developers and an audit.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing