[consumer451]

> Engineers have been circulating an old, famous-among-programmers web comic about how all modern digital infrastructure rests on a project maintained by some random guy in Nebraska. (In their telling, Mr. Freund is the random guy from Nebraska.)

Huh, my take was that the "guy in Nebraska" was Lasse Collin, the original xz maintainer. Am I alone in that?

[johtso]

Just made exactly the same comment, the xz maintainer is clearly the proverbial "random guy in Nebraska"

[wisemang]

That would definitely be a more accurate/literal interpretation of what the xkcd comic meant.

But I think this holds up in the spirit of it, which is that core open source contributors / maintainers keep things afloat despite a shocking lack of resources or investment by the companies that benefit from it. (Notwithstanding the fact that Freund is employed by Microsoft.)

[bicepjai]

Yup, they definitely got that wrong

[quinn_yates]

Same, possibly a mix up on their part

[ownlife]

Why is the NY Times afraid to namedrop XKCD :( https://xkcd.com/2347/

[juliusdavies]

NY Times links to the XKCD comic directly. Try clicking on the words "some random guy in Nebraska" in the article.