What is the experience of maintaining an open source project for 25 years?

Hi everyone, this is Kasong.

Recently, looking at the user data of the official account backstage, more than half (58%) of my friends who follow me are 26 to 35 years old.

At this age, it may have been beaten by the society for several years, and I have my own understanding of the term successful

Although I don’t know what kind of life is a successful life, there is such an open source project:

• It has been developed and maintained for 25 years
• The total number of downloads worldwide is about 10 billion (on average, every netizen in the world downloads 2.5 times)

I believe you will also agree: this is a successful open source project, he is the famous curl .

Next, let us see, what kind of quality can make a project settle down in the long river of history?

The result may be contrary to your intuition~

curl's story

curl is a command line tool for requesting data and supports multiple protocols. Its name is client + url (the client's url tool).

The author is Daniel Stenberg .

In the early 1990s, IRC (a chat protocol, which can be understood as a command-line version of QQ) flourished.

Daniel and friends developed a IRC chat robot. Next, he decided to add currency exchange function to the robot.

To this end, it is http Get to call the exchange rate interface through 060dd28b53671e request. In order to achieve this function, Daniel uses a tool HTTPGet

A single public interface is obviously unreliable. Soon after Daniel Gopher server that provides currency exchange rate interfaces, and a FTP server. To this end, he must support these two protocols on the basis of the original tools.

As more and more protocols are supported, HTTPGet has been misplaced. Therefore, Daniel changed its name to curl .

In the following 20 years, Daniel curl the implementation of 060dd28b5367a7 to all platforms, and continued to iterate obtain data

This is the story of curl

Time friend

Not long ago, Daniel on Twitter:

After my family rests every day, I will continue to work on curl for 1 to 2 hours. Over time, I spent about 1.5w hours curl

The writer Malcolm Timothy Gladwell 10,000-hour theory in "Alien":

The reason why the genius in the eyes of people is extraordinary is not that it is superhuman, but that it has made continuous efforts. 10,000 hours of training is a necessary condition for anyone to become a master from ordinary

Daniel the professionalism of 060dd28b5368fa as an expert contributed to the success curl Obviously he didn't think so.

When talking about curl can be recognized by the community for a long time, Daniel summarized two factors:

consistency

Many library authors regard curl as the underlying dependency. They did this because curl made the consistency promise and kept this promise over the long years.

• curl suddenly no one maintains it? I promised not, I keep the promise
• Will this API be abandoned suddenly? I promised not, I keep the promise

If a project has kept its promises in 25 years, then there is a high probability that it will be reliable in the future.

Now many wheels made by big factories have great ideas. But once it needs to be put into production, it will make people KPI : Is this a 060dd28b536a39 project? What if no one maintains it in the future?

The high-speed iterative Internet, consistency is scarce.

There is no genius, only persistence

Many projects defenders do not like new people misspelled the question put PR , thought it was water PR behavior. Contrary to them, Daniel encourages this behavior.

In his opinion, most people (including himself) are ordinary people, and no one knows the project as soon as they get started. It is a wise choice to start with the PR

Maybe this PR is correct the spelling mistake , the next PR is modify the test case , and the next one is to modify the project bug .

In the long run, successful projects have no genius, only ordinary people who stick to it silently.

It’s as strong as the Justice League and Batman with a combat power of only 5 [manual dog head]

Slow down, step by step

The Internet is so fast. Salaries grow fast, hair falls fast, and old people are eliminated fast.

This gives people a feeling: to be a code farmer is to exchange your life for quick money.

For ordinary people, an annual salary of one million is not the norm, and 996 is not the norm either. These are just a small stop in the course of life under the background of the times.

If the Internet places such emphasis on and elite fan , the most successful products are a group of ordinary people accumulated over a long period of time.

Then why don't we try to be friends with time? Let go of your anxiety, you are awesome.