> It was extremely irresponsible

As a user and admin I disagree. Makes one appreciate what a masterful bit of lexical-engineering “Responsible” Disclosure is, kinda like “Secure” (from me, not forme) Boot — “Responsible” Disclosure is 100% about reputation-management for the various corporation/foundation middleman entities sitting between me and my computer.

Those groups don't care that my individual computer is vulnerable but about nobody being able to say “RHEL is vulnerable” or “Ubuntu is vulnerable”. The vulnerability exists for me either way, and I'd rather have the chance to know about it and minimize risk than to be surprised by the fix and hope nothing bad happened in that meantime.

Immediate public disclosure is the only choice that isn't irresponsible as far as I'm concerned.

So if I found a vulnerability that lets hackers withdraw withdraw all the money in your account without a trail on where the money went, you'd be fine with them disclosing it to the public at the same time as the bank learns about it?

Even when there is no known use case of the attack (other than the security researcher's)?

> The vulnerability exists for me either way, and I'd rather have the chance to know about it and minimize risk

By the time you hear about it, the money could be gone because 1000 hackers heard about it from the researcher before you did.

> than to be surprised by the fix and hope nothing bad happened in that meantime.

Hope is not a good strategy here.

“The choice that maximizes potential damage isn’t irresponsible, because it means I can mitigate my own systems immediately.”

That’s what you’re saying here.

> Immediate public disclosure is the only choice that isn't irresponsible as far as I'm concerned.

No, it's really not.

High severity vulnerabilities are responsibly handled by quietly neutralising them with subtle patches that do not reveal the vulnerability, waiting for those patches to distribute. Then patching or removing the root cause of the vulnerability (at which point opportunists will start to notice), and finally publicly disclosing it when there are already good mitigations in place.

Example: spectre/meltdowm mitigations.

I've been asked to use this approach myself when reaching out to maintainers. Sometimes it's possible to directly fix the vulnerability as a "side effect" by making a legitimate adjacent change.

With immediate disclosure the provider can decide to shut down while it is fixed. Or to notify users and make it their decision. Or to be prepared with a diversified infra and switch over to a non-vulnerable path. e.g, BSDs are not affected by CopyFail

Those groups care about whether millions of computers are vulnerable, likely including your computer. If "immediate public disclosure" was done in all cases every vuln would be exploited and patches would be much lower quality. Shortening the disclosure timeline might be a good idea, 90 days is starting to feel long.

The Venn diagram of mainstream distros and individual Linux users is virtually a circle.

Ubuntu/RHEL is vulnerable and so are most Linux users by extension.