With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.
To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.
Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.
If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.
Florisboard (Android keyboard) was recently updated for the first time in two years. Literally one day after I had given up on it and uninstalled it.
Is the autocorrect any better than Heliboard?
Edit: I didn’t mean to imply that it’s bad; it’s just not very good. Then again, that may also not be Heliboard’s fault. It personally feels like keyboards in general have become worse at autocorrect during the last ten or so years.
came out of nowhere?
I don’t think anyone expected MS-DOS 4.0 (1986) to release under the MIT license in 2024
Ghidra. Boom, here is 90% of ida pro. Enjoy.
As much as I complain about the NSA memeing around with zero days and data collection, their open sourced stuff is really cool and useful.
Same thing for SELinux. Suddenly kernel supports complete MAC security out of box.
Ghidra even gets huge updates with some good features to keep up with Ida.
There really is 2 NSA’s, with conflicting goals. Keep Americans secure, and collect everyone elses data. Its a difficult line to walk. The first half does produce really good advice and tools, but is undermined by the second halfs image.
I fortunately never learnt Ida due to cost, so I have no idea what is missing, but ghidra was a godsend for CTFs. Suddenly reversing challenges were accessible and easy.
https://code.nsa.gov/# - Lots of useful stuff here.
Note for any new comments:
- It helps if you add an explanation of what it does, or link to read more. The name often isn’t descriptive enough, and people love to find new things to use.
