Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
Not necessarily! Maybe we would live in a world of mercurial, or even some other alternative.
And it wasn’t bitbucket (botbicket?), it was BitKeeper, which gave the Kernel folks a license to use BK, but with some restrictions. Among those was a “no reverse engineering” clause, which is what eventually lead to the revoking of that license—lots of interesting articles on this!—frustrating Linus for a few weeks, and finally the start of Git.