The people carrying critical infrastructure alone.
Daniel Stenberg has maintained curl for 28 years from a Swedish suburb, and it now runs on over 20 billion devices — yet most people have no idea they're using it every single day.
On February 18th, 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover sent back images from Mars — compressed by ffmpeg, software now running on 20 billion devices worldwide, mostly maintained by one unpaid developer.
On April 7, 2014, a bleeding heart logo revealed that 17% of the internet's secure servers had been silently leaking passwords, encryption keys, and credit card numbers through a bug in OpenSSL — and anyone could steal them with just a few lines of code.
One trillion SQLite databases are running right now — on your phone, laptop, browser, and smartwatch — all maintained by a single man in Charlotte, North Carolina who's never taken venture capital.