With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.

To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.

Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.

If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.

  • Treeniks
    17•2 months ago

    MuseScore had a big UI rework with MuseScore 4, with an excellent video about the behind the scenes by Tentacruel (https://youtu.be/XGo4PJd1lng).

    Although not sure if it caught people off guard as I’m not a user of it.

    • @helpImTrappedOnline
      4•2 months ago

      I do enjoy his videos. Apparently he working on the audacity overhaul too. Haven’t heard (or looked) at it a few years. Last I head was the freakout when the dared to add some basic telemetry to figure how people actually used the software.

    • @ByteMe
      3•2 months ago

      Is that open source?