And those are only fully packaged user-facing software.

I’d guess almost all of the Rust code for low level hardware access is maintained by a single person. Most of them once joined forces and created a standard, it had 4 developers last time I checked. The only usable cryptography library for C# has a single developer, and while on crypto, that meme got widespread because of OpenSSL, that had a single developer who spent most of his time on OpenSSH and other BSD user-facing software.

Also, while we are on crypto, the modern algorithms were all created by a single researcher, that got famous for a work on how to decide if you can trust a crypto algorithm. Almost everybody uses his code.

Anyway, that meme first appeared because of Javascript, when a developer removed his library (with ~10 lines of code) from the language’s repository and almost every Javascript software broke.

I heard about that last one on a podcast and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post. Genuinely interesting story (if you’re into that sort of thing). The pod was saying how it’s both a flaw of open source that it could happen that way and an advantage because it was discoverable due to the fact that the code is open source.