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.
I want to say the Natron compositing software, but I could be misremembering.
I seem to recall it losing it’s only maintainer and therefore being updated or maintained anymore. I want to say this was back in 2018, but since it’s not a piece of kit I use often, I don’t really think about it enough for it to stick in my head. Anyway…point being. It posted a fairly large update in 2022 and has been doing updates since then.