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Calculating the Truck-Factor of Popular Open Source Projects
An anonymous reader writes: The Truck Factor describes the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. Wikipedia defines it as a "measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members. A high truck factor means that many individuals know enough to carry on and the project could still succeed even in very adverse events." The term is also known by bus factor/number. In this article, the authors calculate the truck factor for 133 popular GitHub applications. Spoiler, but unsurprising: Linux ranks near the top (meaning that it's highly resilient).
You know what's significantly worse than an Open Source project with TF1? A closed source project with a TF1.
Actually, by all relevant measures any important software project can more important than a human life. That is not nice, but it is reality. That we usually do not have to sacrifice human life to keep software projects going is nice and I am all for it. It is however a luxury we have because circumstances allow it. But look at Karshi for example, and you will find that this is not universally true even in modern and more enlightened times.
But that is not what this story is actually about. It is about contingencies and insurance.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's actually less of a concern than it is with small vendor closed source...
There have been a few small software vendors where the company owner or core developer was killed, which then resulted not only in the ceasing of development, but also in the source code either being lost or tied up in legal disputes for years.
For something that's open and has user interest, it can be forked and development can be continued by someone else...
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ReiserFS?
It's actually less of a concern than it is with small vendor closed source...
There have been a few small software vendors where the company owner or core developer was killed, which then resulted not only in the ceasing of development, but also in the source code either being lost or tied up in legal disputes for years.
A much bigger problem with closed source software: The company making it gets bought by its largest competitor, usually the exact product and company you tried to avoid, which then kills the product you were using and tries to force all the costumers to convert.