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ameliaquining 4 days ago

Log4Shell didn't light up all the beacons because Java is "enterprisey", it was because it was probably the worst security vulnerability in history; not only was the package extremely widely used, the vulnerability existed for nearly a decade and was straightforwardly wormable, so basically everybody running Java code anywhere had to make sure to update and check that they hadn't been compromised. Which is just a big project requiring an all-out response, since it's hard to know where you might have something running. By contrast, this set of backdoors only existed for a few hours, and the scope of the vulnerability is well-understood, so most developers can be pretty sure they weren't impacted and will have quite reasonably forgotten about it by next week. It's getting attention because it's a cautionary tale, not because it's causing a substantial amount of real damage.

I do think it's worth reducing the number of points of failure in an ecosystem, but relying entirely on a single library that's at risk of stagnating due to eternal backcompat obligations is not the way; see the standard complaints about Python's "dead batteries". The Debian or Stackage model seems like it could be a good one to follow, assuming the existence of funding to do it.