What’s missing in this article (or at least as much of it as I could read) is that much of the software listed has alternatives. For instance, bash can be replaced by a combination of some other shell (fish, zsh, dash . . .) and some other scripting language (python, perl . . .). There are other compression algorithms than xz, even if they’re less efficient. And so on.

Others are nice-to-haves, but their absence wouldn’t cause much actual technical dysfunction. If Harfbuzz vanished tomorrow, it would result in some ugly text displays. This is not the end of the world.

Looking at the inverted pyramid thing, that’s not really the Internet. That’s whatever that fish bowl network smartphones use.

tl;dr: it’s about the timezone database which is “maintained by a group of volunteers. Originally founded by Arthur David Olson, the project is now led by Paul Eggert and Tim Parenti.”

I know that this usually comes down to one person doing a lion’s share of the work. This applies to so many FOSS pojects, especially when their impact bleeds over into the non-FOSS world (and by now I think we can include Android in that). Yet the world of FOSS has never broken down even when one of these “one person"s quits. We know. But it might be scawy for people who live in proprietary la-la-land.

Don’t get me wrong, this is important. But I find the article with all its dark javascript magic a little hyperbolic, sensationalist. Even the "plain" reading page is. Gigantic headers, large numbers etc.

I could’ve written a similar article, but I would have written it differently.