The Internet is Maintained by 1 Software Developer
Tags: opensource
Published: 2024-02-25 07:38:14

Timothy Ivaikin, a Russian friend of mine commented about nGinx on [this article](https://dev.to/polterguy/single-software-developer-projects-2doh), claiming the same was true for nGinx - So I became curious about it and started doing some investigation around it.

According to [this article](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ws-nginx), [nGinx](https://github.com/nginx/nginx) is being used to serve 34% of all websites in the world. I checked out who's [contributing to nGinx](https://github.com/nginx/nginx/graphs/contributors), and just like I thought, the project has 8,208 commits, and 5,366 of those commits was made by 2 software developers; igorsoev and mdounin.

> This implies that 2 software developers are indirectly responsible for having created the infrastructure that is serving half the internet (almost)

According to their repository, Igor apparently quit some 12 years ago, so the project is 100% dependent upon mdounin today. If mdounin for some reasons stops working on it, and there's a bug in nGinx, almost half the internet would stop working.

## About nGinx

nGinx is professionally maintained by [F5](https://www.nginx.com/about/). According to their own website, the nGinx _"company"_ was obtained for 670 million dollar. This implies that F5 paid 670 million dollars for a **single software developer's ability to create code**.

Implying if [mdounin](https://github.com/mdounin) for some reasons stops working on the code, F5 looses 670 million dollars over night, in addition to that the internet literally **stops working**!

## About Venture Capitalism

Another obvious chain of thought in regards to my latest articles the last couple of days becomes as follows.

1. nGinx serves almost half the internet
2. SupaBase has 4% as many downloads as Magic Cloud
3. nGinx is worth 0.7 billion dollars
4. SupaBase is worth 1 billion dollars
5. **WUT** ...?

I don't mean to pick on SupaBase specifically, but facts are that one of two is true.

* Venture Capitalists have absolutely no idea how to evaluate their own investments
* Venture Capitalism as a whole is a social scam based upon the bigger fool's theory

I suspect the truth is some combination of the above. Facts are, if I studied the portfolio of every single VC fund in existence today, I would find similar _"problems"_ - As in, most of their portfolio's software projects are ipso facto maintained by **a single human being**.

## The world was built by 100 people

In fact, we could bring things further, and claim the world as a whole was in fact built by less than 100 software developers. According to statistics, there are roughly 27 million software developers in the world today. I betcha if you studied who does what, I'm 100% confident in that you'd find that less than 100 of those 27 million devs contributed more than 80% of the code currently in use, if you count market share.

This implies that 100 software developers **literally built the world**, as in the industry that's responsible for creating value worth 670 billion dollars annually, was literally built by less than 100 people! As in ...

> 100 people are responsible for 670 billion dollars in revenue, annually!

What would we do if all of these followed me and [started protesting](https://dev.to/polterguy/no-more-mr-open-source-guy-95k)?

Within 1 week the following companies would go bankrupt.

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Facebook
4. Twitter
5. Amazon
6. Apple

... and the rest of every single Fortune 500 company!

The chain reaction would be _"the end of the world as you know it"_ - Simply because even your local merchant, selling you milk and groceries, is either directly or indirectly dependent upon services or products from some Fortune 500 company. Implying if all Fortune 500 companies goes belly up, the chain reaction would literally result in that within the end of the week, we'd collectively as a specie be back in the stone ages.

> Facts are, 100 people built the world, but probably none of these guys are amongst the top 1% richest people in the world. I suggest you schmucks start paying us ... 😉

You can start by giving me the following ...

1. A 2,000 square meter mansion with an infinity pool and a view over the Aegean sea worth roughly 20 million dollars
2. A BMW 840. I want it in grey
3. A brand new Mini (my wife luves them)
4. 20 million dollars in monthly salary

To be honest with you, the above is reasonable considering **I'm roughly 3 to 5 times as productive as the second most productive software developer in Cyprus** - And you're 100% dependent upon me. And if I stop working together with my 100 best friends, you'd be back in the stone ages before the end of the week ...