Real examples here?

There is a guy named Arthur David Olson who maintains a small database of all the time zones in the world, including things like leap seconds and such. It's used by everybody and it is updated several times a year. See here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

If we could all just stop making changes to time zones, that would make my job very slightly easier.
- Perhaps we'll move to UTC+10¼, and then move forward 45 minutes in the summer.
  
  If the day number is a prime, then we'll go back π hours.
  
  Hope that will help!
I bet he's paid nothing to do it. Then one day, when a timing attack happens that can be traced to the DB, some knobhead CTOs and tech influencers will start talking about "securing the supply chain". They'll want other such bullshit and responsibilities to be shoved unto volunteers.

Two quotes come to mind "Fuck you, pay me" and "Open source maintainers owe you nothing".

Anti Commercial-AI license
- It would make sooo much more sense for the ISO to set something up, and make governments each responsible for keeping it updated, since they're the ones doing the changing.
  
  Require all participants to amend their law/regulations, so there's a note to prompt whoever is in power and changes it next.
  
  I'm sure some places would still neglect to do it... Haha
Wasn't there also very recently a whole thing about the single guy who maintains the NTP spec threatened to retire so he could get a "real" job, which caused a gigantic internet-wide panic as pretty much everything we do relies on computer's clocks being perfectly synced?

Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html

And their website is quirky
- As is their code of ethics.
- It looks pretty decent to me, at least on mobile. Definitely better than 95% of websites.
Damn, I wanted to mention sqlite.
- It’s not too late. Mention it!

Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.

And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn't work (the Readme is top notch).
- I cannot for the life of me find what you’re referencing. I only remember the sqlite / etilqs fiasco with McAfee.
  
  https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can't even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.
Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.

That's not remotely true, but it is nevertheless outstanding work and very much deserving of recognition and support.

I'd say ffmpeg is a good example, it's used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.

And Fabrice Bellard, the original author of ffmpeg, went on to create qemu which pretty much made open-source virtualization possible. Also TCC (even if I don't think that one is widely used), he established a world record for computing decimals of Pi using a single machine that had ~2000× less FLOPS than the previous record, and so much more...
- Fabric Bellard's body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.
  
  Or just genius.

NTP is the one that comes to mind for me.

Basically every device uses it and until fairly recently was maintained by a single person

Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn't know that!
Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you're on Systemd, are usually better suited.
So they have a donation/support page?

I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn't fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I'm telling this story from memory). It's designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.

I'm telling this story from memory

pun intended? ;D
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
- That's actually the video I was retelling from memory.
Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.
It's also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.
- Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server
- I don't know, rm being short for "remove" is very verbaceous.
Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don't remember). That's why it's called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.
- TIL
- I believe you're thinking of ed, and yes, grep was made out of ed. I remember reading about a university professor who, if memory serves, gave his students the code for ed and told them to turn it into (basically) grep. Said that no one ever managed, despite having more time than the original took in total. That's not to say I think this was fair or cool of the professor, it's just an interesting tale.
If he hadn't written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
- but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it's a brilliant piece of software xD
- And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd

I'm surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™

Eh, bagder is more than "just some guy" to a lot of people! To me he's kinda been my tech idol for 20 years lol, he also was a core part of building Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) which was the first open source project I got seriously involved in as a kid ☺️
- "Just some guy" doesn't mean they aren't amazing. I would argue the opposite. It just means they didn't use their abilities to become rich and famous like some other assholes. They're almost certainly more capable than them, not less.
- I second Rockbox here, it's fucking great.
- Holy shit Rockbox was amazing. I might still be subscribed to the mailing list. I used that on a few different MP3 players as a kid. I had no idea. Fuck I am old.
  
  Edit: For a list of what he has worked on - https://daniel.haxx.se/opensource.html

I saw a post earlier about Empress returning to game cracking. For modern video games that use Denuvo DRM, she's the only person who can really crack it, as far as I know. Singlehandedly holding up the AAA game piracy scene.

She is kind of a shithead tbf and fwiw it’s more like she’s the only person who is willing to do it. granted cracking denuvo is something that is extremely difficult and only a small subset of people can do but it’s not like she’s literally the only person on the planet who can. There was that guy who would just release the yearly update of football manager, for one.

It’s far more likely the people who have that skill set just don’t really want to bother with cracking videogames and the potential legal issues that come with distributing them online.
- True, but being the only person willing to do something is kind of laudable in it's own right. Like all of the open source projects relied upon by millions that are sometimes developed primarily by one person in their free time.
- In other words, the Scene is Dead
I can't help but laugh at how batshit crazy she is. Didn't she write a rap at some point??

I'll never not be convinced that she's on a fair amount of meth and/or crack.
- Writing poetry => meth + crack???
It was somewhat weird waiting for the HP release on her TG channel.

Like I've seen my fair share of terf transphobes, but she's honestly best described as a hater.

There were so many rants.

But like with Harry Potter, I like to separate the artist from the art.

Idk who needs to know this, but in Norwegian "runke" means to jerk off. "runk" is the word you add a prefix to in conjugation to get the different inflections

runke - jerk off
runker - jerking off
runket - jerked off

Etc...

also the swedish meme subreddit is called r/unket
- and runket translates to "the jerk", as in a noun referring the act of (and/or the result of...) rubbing one out.
Hi, I'm a Finn. We also have a variation of this.

Ronald's Universal Number Kounter sounds like someone did it on purpose.
- There's a lot of that in the software world. I'm thinking of gimp.
  
  Graphics Image Manipulation Program, yeah right
You meant suffix, not prefix. But this is pretty funny regardless

Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don't believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.

And those are only fully packaged user-facing software.

I'd guess almost all of the Rust code for low level hardware access is maintained by a single person. Most of them once joined forces and created a standard, it had 4 developers last time I checked. The only usable cryptography library for C# has a single developer, and while on crypto, that meme got widespread because of OpenSSL, that had a single developer who spent most of his time on OpenSSH and other BSD user-facing software.

Also, while we are on crypto, the modern algorithms were all created by a single researcher, that got famous for a work on how to decide if you can trust a crypto algorithm. Almost everybody uses his code.

Anyway, that meme first appeared because of Javascript, when a developer removed his library (with ~10 lines of code) from the language's repository and almost every Javascript software broke.
I heard about that last one on a podcast and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post. Genuinely interesting story (if you're into that sort of thing). The pod was saying how it's both a flaw of open source that it could happen that way and an advantage because it was discoverable due to the fact that the code is open source.
- Which podcast? Sounds like something I'd be interested in listening to
- Do you have a link to the podcast?
remember heartbleed?

Furthermore, "RUNK" was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s. Finally, it's missing some important functions that the original 60s program had because "RUNK"s developer doesn't see the purpose of those functions and refuses to add them; and no one has publically released a fork of "RUNK" that adds those functions back in, so you have to do it yourself. Thank God it's open source.

Edit: oh yeah, and back in 2005 there was an effort to make a GUI for it, but "RUNK's" sole developer got mad because "back in the 80s we didn't need GUIs; command line is infinitely faster" and kept intentionally breaking support for the GUI with each bug fix, leading to the project eventually being abandoned.

that really sounds like a case where someone ultimately says "fuck you, runk's developer". why didn't that happen?
- Because frankly, Ronald (the current maintainer, not the original author) is very competent. I say this as somebody who has personally been yelled at by Ronald at a kernel summit; I didn't deserve it, but none of his technical points were wrong. I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it'd still take three of me to do Ronald's job. (Well, "job." I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?) Not to excuse his conduct, just to explain why he's not been replaced yet.

core-js (whose maintainer is also a bit picky about and probably doesn't understand the OSS process) Phil Katz, the guy who invented .zip. To this day, every .zip file contains his initials in hexadecmial. His story is incredibly interesting.

The core-js story always makes me sad. Sure, he's developing an open source project and no one HAS to pay him. But the meager amount of donations and the tons of hate he receives isn't justifiable.
- It's especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
- I had seen the hate before and foolishly just assumed he was deserving of it. Its a horrible situation he's in and he is being cast in a bad light because he reached out for help.
Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He's been taken advantage of by the whole world.

Runk means masturbation in Icelandic so that adds another layer of hilarity to this

Same in Swedish
I'm from the west coast of Canada, a euphemism for jerking off where/when I grew up is "pulling the pud." Moving to the UK had some funny bits...like Christmas Pud...as in pudding(dessert). Pronounced slightly different, but my inner 6 year old had a laugh anyway.
- I've heard "shaking hands with the unemployed".
- https://www.etymonline.com/word/pudendum
  
  It's a more general English phrase. Could come up with a good insult for transphobes with this though. "Pud CHUDs?"
- If I'm remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There's a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on "Sailing the Seas of Cheese" that's just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: "As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there's a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you."
  
  Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn't think I've listened to that album since the 90's. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.

I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.

Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.

When the US came close to going on permanent daylight savings time there were interesting discussions there.

The guy that runs Rufus.

I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here's the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/

The curl author writes a lot about his struggles, but he's also employed to maintain curl, so not really a good example

Paul Eggart is the primary maintainer for tzdb, and has been for the past 20 years.
Tzdb is the database that maintains all of the information about timezones, timezone changes, leap whatever's and everything else. It's present on just about every computer on the planet and plays an important role in making sure all of the things do time correctly.

If he gets hit by a bus, ICANN is responsible for finding someone else to maintain the list.

Sqlite is the most widely used database engine, and is primarily developed by a small handful of people.

ImageMagick is probably the most iconic example. Primarily developed by John Cristy since 1987, it's used in a hilarious number of places for basic image operations. When a security bug was found in it a bit ago, basically every server needed to be patched because they all do something with images.

I think this probably applies...

So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.

In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc...) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).

There are still updates regularly released for it too!

I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).

Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.

Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people
- Also the guy who fixed GTA Online's ridiculous loading times.
There's also Arx Libertatis for Arx Fatalis. Arkane (yes, that Arkane) released the source code for the game. This is a new engine and patch that is basically required. Even if you could play the game on a modern computer (you can't really) you wouldn't want to play without this patch. It does things like making drawing the runes for casting spells more reliable. (For those not aware, you drew runes on your screen and combined them to create spells. You didn't just press a fireball button. You had to figure out what spells combined to make a fireball, and then draw it.)

If you like ImSims or Arkane games, I highly recommend Arx Fatalis. No one has done magic like it since. To be fair, it was one of the slowest and most cumbersome ways to do magic, but it did actually feel like you were part of it. You could cast spells before you learned them if you had the rune and guessed the combination (they all make sense). There were even some spells never told in game that you were expected to figure out. Cheats were even activated using the system, by drawing a certain combination of runes. It's all very cool, and I wish we would get a second modern version of the idea.
- making drawing the runes for casting spells more reliable
  
  Huh....guess I might actually be able to give it a proper go then. I couldn't ever play more than 2-3 30min sessions every few years as I'd get so so so very frustrated with trying to draw runes.
You might like the dark mod if you haven’t heard of it

Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.

The modern man uses ripgrep 👍
- But it's three more letters. No deal.
- What does that offer offer grep/egrep

Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?

It's really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn't been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it's one of those things that's hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.

Yet the vast majority of the world probably don't even know what it is, and wouldn't even understand it if it was explained to them.
- Git is not the only version control software out there, and not the first one either.
  
  Facebook for example is famous for not using git. Because their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better.
  
  Microsoft didn't use git until relatively recently either. They had to make some big contributions to make it work for their system.
- t’s really hard to imagine a world without Git
  
  I've lived it.
  
  CriticalFile.vbs
  
  CriticalFile.V2.vbs
  
  CripicalFile.V2.5.vbs
  
  CriticalFile.DONOTEDIT.txt
  
  _Old.CriticalFile.aspx
  
  LinkToCriticalFilesFold.lnk
  
  GuideToDeploying.CriticalFliles.doc
  
  CritFil.bat
- It's not like there was nothing at all in that space before git came along, e.g. we had svn before, and mercurial more or less in parallel.
- And it all happened because botbicket decided to become greedy, to which Linus responded with taking a month break from Linux to make his own basic versioning tool, and here we are.
  
  Without bitbuckets decisions, wer all still be stuck with SVn shudder
- Everybody would use Mercurial, since Fossil completely lost the race, and both Subversion and CVS are unfit for today's needs.
  
  What is too bad, because Fossil would be much more productive than Git or Mercurial if the software just finished running at all; and Mercurial is way easier to learn than Git.
- Really easy to imagine that world to most people. Like me. Who inspite of using computers since my 386sx family pc, never got into software engineering.
  
  I understand a little about it, but its just a name of a thing i dont know how to use lol
  
  I just find it funny how its a kind of ignorance(for entirely understandable reasons)is bliss situation to me, but a horror to those who use it
Git has tons of contributors though.
- Yeah, and Linus mostly handed off the project to Junio Hamano quite early on (same year, 2005). Seriously, huge kudos to Junio for all his work. Still, it's fun to say this quirky guy who likes penguins started not one, but two free software projects that took the world by storm. Humbling, even.

Until very recently the whole Resident Evil modding community relied solely on a Maya 3DS script that a Chinese dude named Maliwei777 created in 2012. The community cherished that script but it got harder and harder to get the correct 3DS version to run it.

left-pad was the first thing that came to mind for me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

Azer did nothing wrong.

Laurie Voss made a bad call and should feel bad.

The principals of free software was, is, and always will be more important than every single dollar in silicon valley combined.
- No arguments there, if you're gonna depend on a piece of code, you better own it or have a rock solid plan b.
- I think he overreacted a bit, not to having his package name forcibly taken from him, but to being asked to give it up in the first place. Kik explained to him that they have to fight this or lose their tradmark because thats how trademark law works. His response was basically "haha fuck you". He probably could've asked for a couple thousand and just changed the name of his project and everything would've been fine.
Yeah that debacle still pisses me off. Especially the fact that someone could possibly trademark and enforce a trademark a name that’s already in use. It’s made even worse that the package that now uses the stolen name is defunct.

I hope all of the bad actors burn in Hell.
- What pisses me off is that NPM thought it would be okay to remove something from their repository.

Is-even and is-odd on npm.

For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.

Like half of the npm is maintained by a single, arguably awful, person who writes his microprojects into large pieces of software to maximize how often his code gets installed.
- Sindre Sorhus?
- Sounds like a fork is in order
Is-even and is-odd are the stupidest packages ever written. Except for all the others that guy wrote.
The popularity of these two packages shows that something is very wrong with JavaScript.
- No, it shows people are lazy.
I would love this even more if one depended on the other and just did a “not even” for example.
- I thought that was the case tbh, has it changed?
  
  Edit: is-even depends on is-odd.
- Well good news! Time to let yourself love again!
deleted

left-pad

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the classic example. Jobs has some technical skill, but not a lot. He's the "ideas guy" that all other "ideas guy" try to be. I don't have a lot of respect for the "idea guy"; Jobs was a manipulative narcissist, and he should not be emulated.

Woz, OTOH, is an absolute genius, and one of the most genuinely nice people you'll ever meet. Apple made him enough money that he can do whatever he wanted with his life, and what he wanted was to do cool things with computers and pull harmless pranks.

Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. That was more of a collaboration. They all had some level of technical and business skill mixed together. It wasn't quite the complementary skillset we see with Jobs and Woz. A lot of Microsoft's success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.

A lot of Microsoft's success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.

It was also having friends on the IBM board that signed a contract that didn't make any commercial sense....
- It was also being ruthless beyond belief, and destroying anything that could have challenged them. They've held progress back for 40 or 50 years.
- Friends?, bill gates mother worked there
And Woz wasn't the only genius who worked at Apple at the time. Pretty much everyone who worked on the original Macintosh was brilliant.

Imagemagick.

Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.

Another one is OpenSSL.

I like the imagemagick .desktop file that is always created when you install the package. It opens up a really terrible and dated paint-like program that no one ever uses.
https://xkcd.com/2347/

Mark Russanovich was just some guy who had trouble fixing Windows computers so he wrote systernals from scratch including widely used psexec and other required tools if you are forced to be a windows admin. He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.

"He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks."

Thanks for this. Really brightened my day.

Ronald is ~~Linus Torvald~~ zloirock, and his contribution is immeasurable.

Edit: you can see in the replies to this comment that Linus was a poor example. There are people with an almost equivalent contribution to the digital world who have seen almost no recognition at all.

I think Linus sits at the intersection of both groups. Linus is not some Ronald. The Ronalds of this world are for example the creator of core-js.
- Oh hey! I've used that package for years.
- Still mad about what happened to that guy.
Isn’t Linus pretty famous for his tech tips YouTube channel?
- Wrong Linus, That's Linus Sebastian.
Actually I think he has already had an adequate amount of recognition:

"In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.[29] That year both companies went public and Torvalds's share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million"

his autobiography is in several hundred library collections worldwide

Awards he's received:

2 honorary doctorates

2 celestial objects named after him

Lovelace Medal

IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

EFF Pioneer Award

Vollum Award

Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum

C&C prize

Millenium Technology Prize

Internet Hall of Fame

IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award

Great Immigrants Award
- Wow! A company gave away money without being contractually obligated to do so? The world sure has changed since then. I'm glad that Torvalds is doing well, he completely changed the world.
  
  I wonder how Brahm Cohen is doing. He also had a huge impact on the world. I know he got a write-up in Wired Magazine after inventing Bit Torrent (that's how I learned about it way back then), but I haven't heard much about him since.

curl

Although it's now a larger organization, Redis was started and maintained by some guy that just wanted to make his website faster. It's very widely deployed.

It's okay you can just say FFmpeg

Also Linux

Also CoreJS

Also

sure? i tried 8bit transparent grayscale png generation and it turns out imagemagick produces images the kindle can display and ffmpeg fucks them up majorly and they wont show on kindle. ffmpeg is nice though.
- FFmpeg is basically the only piece of audio/video conversion software in widespread use. Everything uses it under the hood. Microsoft Teams used it to stream your webcam. VLC uses it to play video. If you've ever uploaded your video to an online service to convert it to a different file format or codec, chances are the server that processed it did so using FFmpeg.
  
  I have also noticed that FFmpeg kind of sucks at generating stills for reasons I'm not sure about though.

TIL Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are half guys.

They prefer to be called Hobbits.
What are half guys anyway? Are they missing a ball? A few screws?

Anti Commercial-AI license

The do-nothings vs the did-somethings.

Numpy

Runk in Swedish has a different meaning.

I remember reading a story here not too long ago about a guy who broke the internet by taking his code away because some big company forced to have his package's name or something along those lines

That's leftpad. The package name dispute was over something else, but they pulled all their packages from npm in protest. Turned out leftpad was a transient dependency for a huge swathe of all JavaScript.
Also, faker.js https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/9/22874949/developer-corrupts-open-source-libraries-projects-affected
And IMO Koçulu should have sued NPM for everything they had. What NPM did to Koçulu was in violation of everything they stood for. Koçulu was there first with the Kik name, he should have had 100% of the rights to keep it.

Is-even 😤

And isUneven which just calls isEven and returns the opposite lmao

A few libraries come to mind immediately: fftw (I think the most widely used fft library) or GMP (I think the most used multi precision library).

Seconded. https://www.fftw.org/

Huh... My dad is a software engineer and his name is Ronald. He also secured several software patents when he worked for a big chip wafer manufacturer. He might actually be the Ronald in this meme... 🤔

is-number

xz seems like another good example

I'd put the deflate algorithm over the LZMA algorithm just because deflate is used by both windows (zip) and Unix (gzip). Windows I don't think has added LZMA/xz support until recently if at all.
- I agree but windows does come with a version of tar preinstalled installed. I'm not sure if it uses xz though.
  
  The reason I named xz though is the xz-utils backdoor that was such a big deal.

Oh and then you get all the projects with recursive acronyms, like WINE Is Not Emulation, MAME Ain't (an) Mp3 Encoder, and of course GNU's Not Unix.

MAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder

You're thinking of LAME. MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
- See why those names are kinda dumb? You end up with a lot of fairly similar 4 letter words.