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sheets.worksLong Story Short Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people. We counted them from the code itself. Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet. They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time.
Paul Eggert giving a talk on the time zone database, LibrePlanet 2022. Free Software Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0. Paul Eggert Teaches computer science at UCLA, and has been the official coordinator of the time zone file since 2012. 4,000,000,000 Android phones and iPhones use his file.
We didn't count servers, Macs or laptops, which would push the number higher. Your phone's time zone, as the file has it today On 29 September Paul put out version 2026e of the file. The first line of its notes says that Manitoba moves to permanent -05 on 31 October, which tells phones in Winnipeg not to set their clocks back on 1 November, and it was typed in by two volunteers a month ahead. Of the 251 changes made to the file in the last year, 218 were his and 28 were Tim Parenti's. In 2011 an astrology software company sued Paul and Arthur Olson, who started the file in 1986 at the National Institutes of Health, claiming some of its history came from an atlas the company owned. The file's mailing list and download site were switched off until IANA, which keeps the internet's master lists, took them over later that month. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended them for free, and the company dropped the case in February 2012.
“In case I am no longer available due to retirement or whatever.”Paul Eggert, asking the tz mailing list to make Tim Parenti his backup, 20 May 2020 I also make a daily word game. Play today’s sentence. About two minutes. Dependency, Randall Munroe, xkcd 2347. CC BY-NC 2.5, colours inverted. People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". We wanted to know how close to true it is.
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. “It's also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.”Lasse Collin, xz mailing list, 8 June 2022 Lasse Collin Lives in Finland and looks after xz, the compression tool on almost every Linux server and inside every iPhone.
He wrote that line in the same email where he said his ability to care had been "fairly limited mostly due to longterm mental health issues". For months, accounts calling themselves Jigar Kumar and Dennis Ens had been posting to the list about how slowly things were moving, and a contributor called Jia Tan had been sending useful fixes. Lasse gave Jia Tan more access. In 2023 Jia Tan made 304 changes to xz and Lasse made 172, which is the red on the wall below. In February 2024 the versions Jia Tan released carried a hidden way into Linux servers. Andres Freund, an engineer at Microsoft, found it on 29 March because his logins were using more processor time than they should, before most Linux systems had shipped it. Nobody has found out who Jia Tan is.
Lasse Collin Jia Tan everyone else Every change to xz since January 2021, one square each. In 2021 almost all of them are Lasse's. 28 January 2022: the first change written by Jia Tan goes in.
By 2023 Jia Tan is making more changes than Lasse, 304 to his 172. February 2024: Jia Tan releases two versions with the backdoor inside. Andres Freund finds it on 29 March.
After that it is Lasse on his own again, and in 2025 he wrote 97 percent of the changes. $57 a month was what Denis Pushkarev raised when he asked for donations to keep core-js going. Denis Pushkarev Wrote core-js, which lets new JavaScript work in old browsers.
By his own count it runs on about half of the thousand busiest websites in the world. In 2019 he was working on core-js full time without pay, living in Russia because it was cheaper. By his own account, three weeks after a big release he was driving home at 3 a.m. when two young women on a dark road ended up under his car, and one of them died. The families asked for about $80,000, and the prosecutor asked for seven years. He added a message that appeared in the terminal every time anyone installed core-js, asking for help or a job. Millions of developers saw it, and many of them complained about the message. He went to prison in January 2020 and was released early, about ten months later. Denis Pushkarev everyone else Every change to core-js, week by week, from June 2019. Nearly all of them are his. December 2019: 101 changes in a month. In January 2020 he goes to prison, and the weeks after that stay almost empty. October 2020: he is out and back at work. Downloads nearly doubled while he was inside. This year he wrote 95 percent of the changes, and he has two sponsors on GitHub.
5,408 of 5,409 changes to sudo between 2008 and 2018 were made by Todd Miller. “I'm currently in search of a sponsor to fund continued sudo maintenance and development.”Todd C.
Miller, millert.dev, February 2026 Todd Miller Has maintained sudo, the command that gives you admin rights on a Mac or a Linux server, since the early 1990s. Sudo was first written around 1980 at SUNY Buffalo, and Todd has looked after it for longer than Linux has existed. After The Register wrote about his note in February, the project's Open Collective budget reached about $61,700 a year and 30 people sponsored it on GitHub, which makes sudo the best funded one-person project in our count.
Text inside libjpeg.so, read off an Android 16 phone Copyright (C) 1991-2022 The libjpeg-turbo Project and many others DRC Runs libjpeg-turbo, which opens every JPEG on Android phones and in Chrome and Edge, and signs his emails with his initials.