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.

    • Lemongrab
      10·
      3 months ago

      Ghidra the code reverse engineering tool for analyzing code?

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • CameronDev@programming.dev
        4·
        3 months ago

        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.