CURL is kinda like that. Its in a better place now but hes still getting a bit burnt out .

"bus factor" I believe it's called. How many people have to be hit by a bus to crash the project. As for stuff I've experienced. Ham radio overlaps a fair bit with FOSS, so there's that. Last year there was an argument between the team developing a new digital voice protocol (M17) and the guy who develops the most popular modem for digital voice (MMDVM). I had a raspberry pi with an MMDVM hat whose SD card had corrupted, and I couldn't be bothered to fix it until a few weeks ago. When it went down it could do M17, and when I brought it back up it couldn't. That's how I found out.

Oh yeah also piefed only has a couple of devs on the entire project. A lot of open source is like that actually (kinda like xkcd is calling out in your example). Its crazy how much software we use is made by a VERY small subset of people.

I think most hobbies have a few legends of the hobby.

I recently got into learning about foraging. There's is one dude is Wisconsin who basically wrote "The Book" on foraging. Samuel Thayer has basically rewrote what is and isn't edible. He tried all the old sources himself as well as doing checking ethnobotany sources and asking people native to the region about every plant. He's got three books and the ultimate field guide. All his books and titles are the source of the new AI slop foraging books out there.

For larp, no. It's a hobby pretty much defined by everyone reinventing the wheel constantly.

For reenactment/experimental archeology? There are definitely authoritative works, but those are mostly by professional, traditional historians. There are remarkably few books on how to, say, bend an early medieval hedge, or how thick your daub needs to be or how old Madder should be to get the best colours.

I’m into home distilling and there’s some guy called Alex who posted under Bokakob and designed a still back in 2001 and posted it on homedistiller.org. That design is still in use today and nobody really knows much about that guy or heard from him much since.

Support the artist

https://xkcd.com/2347/

yup, i have a vue 2 project that was using a UI-component library maintained by a single person, and i needed to migrate the project to vue 3, that person didn't have the resources to do it soon enough and i had to rewrite most of my app to switch to another UI-library, i chose this time one that's maintained by a large team instead