Sheets.works publishes wonderful interactive visual essays (“Data Drops”) every week, and I always forget to visit (and link to) them. This week, my socials and feeds were awash with links to one of its recent essays, The people holding up the internet:

We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.

11 of 23 projects had one or two people doing the regular work.

If you’ve been on the internet for any reasonable amount of time, you’ve probably seen the “All modern digital infrastructure” XKCD comic. This essay is the proof.

One example of the “random person” who is “thanklessly maintaining” critical internet infrastructure is Todd Miller. Miller made “5,408 of 5,409 changes to sudo between 2008 and 2018.” sudo is “the command that gives you admin rights on a Mac or a Linux server” (and the subject of another well-known XKCD comic). It has about 30 current sponsors on GitHub and an “estimated annual budget” of just under $62,000 on Open Collective. That is a mere pittance for a project that is used by virtually every sysadmin and Unixy system in the world to gate access to sensitive files and destructive commands, yet is “the best funded one-person project in our count,” notes Sheets.works.

I find it both exceedingly heartwarming and immensely unsettling that huge swaths of our digital infrastructure are maintained by a random collection of volunteers who make effectively zero money from their work and whose main incentive is to write code they’re proud to share with the world.

The lack of financial support for these critical projects stands in stark contrast to the billions of dollars they (directly or indirectly) help generate. Meanwhile, the new Omarchy Linux “distribution”—effectively the personal Linux configuration of white nationalist David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”)—accumulated nearly $27 million in pledges in the span of a few months.

Merit, longevity, and foundational importance to the internet are clearly not the overarching criteria for securing funding for open source projects.