| ▲ | OsamaJaber 4 hours ago |
| 30+ years maintaining one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure on nearly every Linux and Unix system, and he's currently looking for a sponsor to fund continued development. Every company running sudo in production owes this man. Someone should fix that |
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| ▲ | tuhgdetzhh 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2347/ |
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| ▲ | noosphr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this. Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay. |
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| ▲ | omoikane 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA. | |
| ▲ | wmf an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can demand payment but it doesn't mean you'll get paid. These days companies will clone your work instead of paying. | | | |
| ▲ | saubeidl 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The GPL is a good idea. It's our socieconomic system that isn't. | |
| ▲ | groby_b an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a nice slogan, but how does it work? Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra? The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder. Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department? What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe. | | |
| ▲ | conception an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades. | | |
| ▲ | groby_b 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things. It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers. | |
| ▲ | mulmen 16 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want? The problem with commercial software is the lock in. |
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| ▲ | brightball 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility. Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does. |
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| ▲ | lenerdenator 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think they even see it as their responsibility, more, "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software". | |
| ▲ | shimman an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Seriously, just put a VAT on digital services to fund a system that pays out grants to individuals to help maintain open source software. It should be obvious by now that corporations will rat fuck the commons for monetary gain and there is a serious need for democratic initiatives to put technology back into the hands of the people. |
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| ▲ | af78 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Surprisingly Jia Tan has not offered to help yet. |
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| ▲ | boringg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Right? A company to step and cut a check to support this would get positive publicity and there doing something good for community at large. Someone step up. |
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| ▲ | lovich 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Companies don’t step up and do things for the common good. They do things for profit. Occasionally that looks like they are charitable if the value of the PR is worth it for them. No one[1] changes what product they are using based on funding or not of open source software. Companies will step in and fund it if they want control, like with Rust, or if the maintainer finally stops giving them free labor and they actually need the software. [1] not enough people to alter finances |
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| ▲ | groby_b an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You can only fix that with leverage. The sudo maintainer doesn't have it. sudo is valuable, but if Todd stepped away, you could (and would) find other maintainers because it's so important. If you want to fix it, you need organizational heft comparable to the companies using it, and the ability & willingness to make freeriding a more painful experience. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I disagree on "the most critical" part. You can be superuser at all times. I understand the arguments why not; I am pointing out that this is possible. Despite people claiming aliens will arrive and nothing will work, everything works fine when the superuser account is used too. Also, I disagree that every company needs to pay the man. Funding is important, yes, but a *nix system is not crippled without sudo. You can change the permission systems. The superuser can do so too. It is not black magic. The permission system is trivial. sudo is simply a feature of convenience, not a "if sudo does not exist, nothing works" - that just makes no sense. |
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| ▲ | oconnore 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. Sudo is kind of a UX tool for user sessions where the user fundamentally can do things that require admin/root privileges but they don't trust themselves not to fat finger things so we add some friction. That friction is not really a security layer, it's a UX layer against fat fingering. I know there is more to sudo if you really go deep on it, but the above is what 99+% of users are doing with it. If you're using sudo as a sort of framework for building setuid-like tooling, then this does not apply to you. |
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| ▲ | acdha 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. … and sudo is a common tool for doing that so you can do things like say members of this group can restart a specific service or trigger a task as a service user without otherwise giving them root. Yes, there are many other ways to accomplish that goal but it seems odd to criticize a tool being used for its original purpose. | | |
| ▲ | pphysch 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | PSA for anyone reading this, you should probably use polkit instead of sudo if you just want to grant systemd-related permissions, like restarting a service, to an unprivileged user. It's roughly the same complexity (one drop-in file) to implement. | | |
| ▲ | acdha 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I’d broaden that slightly to say you should try to have as few mechanisms for elevating privileges as possible: if you had tooling around sudo, dzdo, etc. for PAM, auditing, etc. I wouldn’t lightly add a third tool until you were confident that you had parity on that side. |
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| ▲ | throw0101a 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. And doing cross-role actions may be part of that production environment. You could configure an ACME client to run as a service account to talk to an ACME server (like Let's Encrypt), write the nonce files in /var/www, and then the resulting new certificate in /etc/certs. But you still need to restart (or at least reload) the web/IMAP/SMTP server to pick up the updated certs. But do you want the ACME client to run as the same service user as the web server? You can add sudo so that the ACME service account can tell the web service account/web server to do a reload. | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Almost everyone is running sudo in production. | |
| ▲ | bloqs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the fact this is a reply to the content in the parent just demos the complete lack of social skills or empathy many in this community are known for | |
| ▲ | bobmcnamara 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Auditing. |
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