this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Honestly, this could be referring to most open-source projects. I’d imagine many of the popular ones were originally made to solve a problem for themselves and then everyone jumps onboard with that solution.
Linux itself also kinda fits here considering it was meant to just sort of be a small project in the beginning and I doubt Linus ever could have predicted what it became.
I have a tiny php library for a somewhat popular framework. It was made so a company could protect a very old database and certain tables. It started as a one off 9 years ago. It was one php file of less than 50 lines.
As of this month it has been downloaded 2 million times. I still can't believe its been used this much. And I'm the only maintainer. If I wanted to I could ruin a lot of peoples days. But I won't.
In a couple of decades, we are going to have large swaths of code that will outlive its creators being used on essential infrastructure.
Which one?
Laravel.
Whelp.
"most" is a bit strong. Many open source projects never get users or any kind of traction, they're just a passion project for the author. The lucky few fill a need and take off. Review the package usage count on npm or the GitHub stars for projects - there's a tiny fraction that make it big.
Considering that making it big just means a lot of responsibility, angry messages, AI-driven bug reports and still no pay, I wouldn't call them lucky.
I would, sarcastically.
To be fair, you can also somewhat steer whether it will take off as a dev, by how you promote it and how much time you take to make it easily usable by others. Many devs really don't care to have their passion projects take off, because it means you'll likely spend less time doing your passion thing, more time doing user support.