DEV Community

Discussion on: How much popularity does a software project need?

Collapse
 
flaque profile image
Evan • Edited

Software dies when it's no longer worked on. For example, take 🔮Samba.🔮

Have you heard of Samba? If you're answered "no," you're like 100% of the population.

Samba is an open source Server Message Block networking protocol server built in 19 freakin' 92. That's 26 years ago. Samba is as old as the country of Bosnia.

What's a Server Message Block (SMB) protocol? No idea. Why do you need an SMB server? Reasons. Who made it? Old people.

But you know what? Samba's last release was 13 days ago. It's still actively maintained, runs on more operating systems than you've heard of and comes standard on most flavors of linux.

That project is a testament to the obscure. It's a miracle that those developers are able to survive the thanksgiving questions from their family: "What do you do?"

So does software die when it's not popular? No probably not. Does it die when few people are using it? Still no.

Software dies when you stop working on it.