Reading the release history[1]. I'm kind of shocked that sudo gets active development and monthly releases. I would have thought that something this old and venerated would have been "done" long ago.
Absolutely false. I have built tons of tools which are feature complete and continue to work to this day without intervention. Heck, I even have tools I no longer use that people asked me to keep available because they do, and they’ve been chugging along for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary.
Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add.
You might have written software that is "done" if you compile it with a single compiler version and don't use any OS hooks/APIs and don't care if future changes breaks your software. I.e. it's done if you think that people will stop needing to use it at some point in the future.
A tool like sudo can never be done because it integrates with the constantly updating OS and will always need maintenance.
Not a great example as that "done" tool (whose currrent iteration barely functions) will be made unavailable after a few years.
That tool is still very much in active use in my industry, and we'll need to figure out what to do with some 10000 fla files that we need to occasionally edit and republish (hint: the solution probably involves a certain Swedish software repository).
> Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add.
Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.
> for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary
I'll believe it when I see it. Keeping something running for a long time is a lot easier task than building something that can be run in an ever changing world.
Given that it's that old I'd wager that it isn't runnable on/compileable for ARM64 without some kind of maintenance. And if it's written in an interpretable language there is a good chance that the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL by now.
> A lot of the time, failing to to finish software indicates a badly defined scope.
And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
> I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one
Oh, but it's so much more beautiful than that! You're really underselling it! It's not "the reason stated by the customer support", it's:
The reason snarkily paraphrased by a Mastodon post
Which quotes a Twitter post
Which quotes a Bluesky post
Which tells a story about a conversation with an Adobe customer service rep.
Surely that tongue-in-cheek Mastodon post increases the information that we have about this incident by exactly Zero.
Many of the bugs were fixed in 26.1, but still, I had to fix it to use it.
I was surprised that not much of the entire web was broken, but a cursory search of commits showed that the WebKit/Apple team took the approach of coding in site specific hacks for popular sites (eg instagram, google search!) for iOS 26.
Maybe I’m not looking in the right places, but I rarely see fixed position elements in modern web layouts— I imagine that’s why you didn’t see more disruption.
They may not be used in layouts, but they can be present in cases like keyboard open (if you wanted to attach some controls above the software keyboard for example); or just ever growing compatibility hacks.
What “lack of profitability”? They just reported a record quarter. Adobe shoves full Creative Cloud subscriptions down everyone’s throats; buying one tool, especially when it’s not one of the flagships, is uncommon. What exactly are they losing by just letting Animate be?
> And if it's written in an interpretable language
I have never ever ever had to change shell, Ruby, or JavaScript code because “the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL”. Never. That code keeps happily running, doing its work, with whatever version of the interpreter I have available in whatever box.
> And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
So what? That’s perfectly fine. Do you drink milk out of a baby bottle? Do you ride a bike with training wheels? It’s perfectly fine to build a tool for a purpose and a time and place and let it exist there for the people who care for it. That’s also true of video games (which, lest we forget, are software). In a world where people are constantly complaining about software updates moving shit around, removing features, and adding crap they don’t want, plenty of people appreciate that the things they like continue to work as they always have.
> Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.
Yeah, although "finished" software is antithetical to this always have new features to push onto your customers subscription model, so it's not entirely unrelated.
Having said that I still find it strange. I can imagine it might not be able to ride on the AI bubble, and perhaps animators are especially vocal about not wanting AI in their tools. But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable? They do have a subscription model, and customers, so people are paying for this product.
Compared to other digital art, the data for vector animation takes relatively little space to store. It also requires much less resources to render than other forms of video, and rasterized video output should compress really well compared to alternatives, especially with modern codecs that are not only optimized for regular film. So surely it shouldn't be that expensive to maintain for them compared to all their other projects.
It's a bit ironic that digital goods, which are arguably the only products which once compiled can be stored, used, and copied perfectly bit-for-bit, are also the only industry that seems to have this problem with being unwilling to call a product "done".
The reasons for software churn are economic, cultural, and psychological, not technological.
> Absolutely false. I have built tons of tools which are feature complete and continue to work to this day without intervention
And how many of these tools are mission critical to the point that they are installed on almost every Linux box in existence, probably invoked tens of billions of times per day, both by humans and software, and the entire world would be in deep goddamn trouble if there was a serious security flaw that doesn't get fixed immediately?
You’ve moved the goalposts so far away, they’ve left the breathable atmosphere. Look at your condition, it’s over 50 words. I didn’t say “all software can be done”, I just said that it’s not true that software is never done. It’s not a universal truth that applies to all software.
There's a difference between software that's "done" (it never needs updates, ever) and software that's done (it only needs maintenance for security and platform churn).
The former is extremely rare; platform churn alone will usually demand updates, even if your code is otherwise airtight. Forces generally beyond your access will demand that your code is able to conform to platform standards. The demand this places can be very variable and depends more on the platform than you. (Windows has low platform churn since it's possible to futz with compat features, Linux is extremely variable on your codebase, MacOS is fairly constant and from what I know about mobile phones, you're basically signing up to forever maintenance duty).
The latter is much more common; sure, sudo still gets updates but most of those won't be new features. Specification wise, sudo is "done". It does what it needs to, it's interface is defined and there aren't going to be any strange surprises when I run sudo between any system made in the past 10 years or so.
The problem is that when you're selling software, demanding compensation for the former is a hard sell since it's things customers won't see or necessarily care about. Demanding compensation for the latter is much more obviously acceptable.
I’m not sure truly ‘done’ exists on systems that interact with other systems unless it’s an entirely closed loop.
I reckon closed-loop systems can be ‘done’ every bit as much as hardware systems can be if the design, debugging and implementation are disciplined enough.
Oops, yes, I meant a constant non-zero rate. It's slightly above mobile phones, where the developer is treated as the problem that needs to fix itself.
Stuff written for one version of MacOS will probably work for the next few versions, but there's just as likely a chance that Apple has decided that you need to do a full on update of all your older tools. Things like dropping Rosetta, 32-bit from the kernel and so on and so forth. There's not really any recourse, unlike Windows and Linux where you can usually finagle a workable solution without having to resort to updating everything all the time (so platform churn exists, but a user can theoretically choose to avoid it).
This is unlike phones, where there's basically no real expectations for when you need to update stuff, so it becomes a case of "you need to test every version". The lack of respect for tool stability is just one other reason why the mobile ecosystem is the user-hostile hell it is; this platform churn pretty much is one of the two roots of why mobile apps are Like That. (The other being that running your own choice of tools is treated as a privilege, not a right.)
> platform churn alone will usually demand updates, even if your code is otherwise airtight. Forces generally beyond your access will demand that your code is able to conform to platform standards.
Platform churn updates are a failure to limit scope and dependency. If you stick with stable standards like C99/POSIX/X11/SDL, test strictly and build liberally etc., then who cares what the Web/Qt/Metal people are doing?
I'm not intimately familiar with Wireguard, but there are some things that are almost universally applicable:
- It should run on an maintained OS (which should run on available hardware), so whatever changes are necessary to keep pace with that
- It may want to add optimizations regarding newer CPU architectures
- It uses a compiler, so whatever changes necessary to stay on a maintained version of the compiler
- It uses cryptography, so whatever changes necessary to stay up to date with latest cryptographic research to provide a secure solution, as well as updating cryptographic libraries to not be exposed to CVEs found in them. It also exists in the context of one/multiple jurisdictions, so possibly also changes to comply with interference in sound cryptography (let's hope not).
And all of those are just part of the things to keep up with the world around you evolving. Of course there may also be bugs to fix in the code itself, and/or new ones created by doing any of the changes above.
Even their definition of "complete"[0] includes "active maintenance" and "still much to do".
It uses Curve25519 for key exchange and ChaCha20-Poly1305 for symmetric encryption. There aren't many hardware primitives that would speed it up, although AVX2 and similar would help process ChaCha20.
But also sudo has A LOT of features that 95% of people don't use. Just checkout `man sudo` to get a sense for this. And it includes plugins like the popular visudo plugin. You can see from the release cadence that real improvements continue to be made. Though it is a bit more work to secure a moving target.
I was wondering the same thing. I would have thought every possible combination of parameters would have been tried by now. I guess it just goes to show you that your code is never really complete.
> I guess it just goes to show you that your code is never really complete.
Yes and no, feature bloat usually justify themselves innocently and once you go down that slope there is no return.
The hardest thing to do in software is commit yourself to a set of feature and protect it from any "helpful additions", naming might be the second hardest.
Sudo’s networking functionality is infuriating too, because if my system’s DNS is broken, I get to wait 60 seconds for sudo to work, during which time I can’t even ctrl+c to cancel!
(It has to do with sudoers entries having a host field, since the file is designed to be deployed to multiple servers, which may each want differing sudoers rules. It’s truly 90s era software.)
Yeah, silly as it is, I guess it didn't even occur to me that sudo had a developer or maintainer, or was even a "program"; to me it has been one of those things that has and always will exist and I had just assumed it evolved and came about alongside Cro-Magnon man.
But of course, that's silly. Of every piece of software has to be written. I should probably throw the guy a few bucks, considering his code runs in basically every big script on the planet.
how does the metaphor of stolen valor (in my understanding: claiming accolades or military credentials/decorations that one never received) apply to that project?
I don’t know anything about the history here; it’s a genuine question.
A security-focused rewrite of a security-critical program that removes insecure features and prevents whole classes of vulnerabilities from being introduced in the future is hardly “useless”.
would it be better if they didn't skip the hard part? (i.e. if they re-designed it from first principles)
does something being hard to do make it more virtuous?
would it be better if they didn't have fun coding it?
is something worse if it was fun to make?
Pedantically, the “stolen valor” metaphor absolutely doesn’t fit here; you’re just griping about the “sudo brand” being used in another project’s title (which … citation needed, and so what? Is “doas” not committing theft but “sudo-improved” is?)
More generally, that’s an easy case to make against any software you don’t like: “it’s just reimplementing $whatever and trying to pretend to be the original therefore it’s unethical”. Some rewrites are good, and a huge benefit of the act of rewriting is that you do have a clear blueprint and understanding of the requirements (hell, Linux was a rewrite). Should the original creators of a thing be the only people who can ethically rewrite it? Where’s the line here?
I think the rise of the open-source redistributor groupie has been an interesting cultural revolution. I wonder if it will persist. Even 10 years ago, the idea of Free As In Speech dominated the idea of Free Software. Today, the greatest enthusiasm on Hacker News and Reddit is for something like Meta's Llama license (which cannot be used by people or corps with sufficient numbers of users). It certainly seems like someone out there could go out and propose the Microfree License which only applies to sufficiently non-rich people.
For my part, I want none of it. I find this reduction of a significant philosophy to some kind of base tax-and-distribute mechanism distasteful. I don't like communities were this stuff is big and they always want to run some taxation scheme where they redirect money to their own personal pet projects. It is fortunate that modern tools are good enough to build personal insulation from this stuff.
Imagine the farce of Apply HN repeated continuously. Simply awful.
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
I wonder if sudo would be better off joining one of those open source foundations instead of staying solo. It's too small to justify a meaningful amount of contribution to these companies, at which point the bureaucratic overhead of dealing with it probably kills the motivation
If he actually did charge money someone else would've written an implementation of sudo to solve their own needs and avoid the overhead of transacting with a random developer.
"Your 3 months sudo trial is expiring. Would you like to sign up for sudo-pro (best for hobbiest and small teams), sudo-business (up to 100 users) or sudo-enterprise (reach out for a quote)"
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.
Several states fund open science, and a couple of them actually do fund open source projects. Germany has its sovereign tech agency for this; France has publicly-funded research agencies that work on a lot of open source stuff, and there are others. There are EU initiatives as well.
It’s not perfect, but it is already something that is being done.
But how would that work? There isn’t unlimited money so who decides what software to support with state money and which developers? I don’t have trust in a bureaucracy to decide which developers should get paid to work on sudo. Just look at a the sudo-rs debacle and that’s without money involved.
You have a failure of imagination if this is what you think, luckily in politics we don't have to listen to people like you and instead those with an actual vision of a better future.
I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses[1]. The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.
From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].
I used to volunteer for a local non-profit a few years ago.
From time to time, I would reflect on the fact that Microsoft and other commercial suppliers were getting paid for providing services to us, but I was expected to work for free.
For the same logic they are tax-exempt. There is a general consensus that their goal is the greater good (like developing sudo and such) and not the usual capitalistic good of generating more money.
Then again, you usual Friday outing of FANG engineers may have more money than some nonprofits too.
As covered literally just a few days ago (IIRC), you absolutely can demand payment: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi actively works to detect MDM, and if found, demand payment.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
> any time someone says something is post-$thing it means what they are doing is in dialogue with and in response to $thing. “we were doing that before $thing” no, you can’t be in dialogue with something that hasn’t happened yet.
> this is like saying “what do you mean post-modernist architecture, architecture predates modernism”.
Releasing open source software and then “demanding payment” goes against everything about open source.
If someone expects to be paid for the use of their software, releasing it as open source is not what they want.
If a maintainer of a software project starts trying to demand payment or threatening to change license terms, it’s a reasonable response for a company to fork it or build their own solution.
And this is why all new projects by independent developers should seriously consider using a post-open source license before defaulting to corporate-friendly/corporate-first OSI licenses
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.
The challenge is that this doesn't really work for community-developed software.
Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?
Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.
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.
This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.
Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.
Copyright law is hundreds of years old and originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
It was created when there was a scarcity of content, so state violence was used to encourage production of content.
But now we don't live in the age of scarcity of content. On the contrary, content creators are competing for a possibility to get into consumers' attention span and push their agenda (ads). Everything has changed.
Removing all copyright restriction will not decrease the amount of content available for a person through their lifetime even a few percent.
> originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
We agree that that was its initial stated intention.
However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").
The world has changed substantially since the 1710 Statue of Anne; there's a thousand things that you could call the modern-day equivalent of mechanically printing a book, with myriad capital and operating costs and availability. Many ways an independent author or artist can publish their work are extremely cheap and effective. I'm relatively anti-copyright, but that doesn't mean that everyone currently benefiting from copyright law is rent-seeking in an exploitive way.
If you can't explain why it did not work in the past, and can't explain how & why things will be different this time, you don't have a plan. History is a harsh mistress.
Communism worked in China, for some definition of "worked". Stalinism eventually failed in the USSR and elsewhere. An extensive literature explains these things, as well as explaining different forms and varieties of "communism", and things that people call "communism" but aren't.
Communism worked so well in China that as soon as they adopted something resembling free markets in some regions, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, their GDP per capita rose amazingly fast for 3~4 decades. Not exactly a stellar example.
GPLv3 is a bit overreaching , especially in patent clauses. The GPL as idea is great but the license needs a little more refining
The constant fear of lawyers that using some GPL lib will infest entire codebase of their project with GPL is a real problem that stops many corporations from contributing in the first place.
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.
I guess I don’t understand. Take RHEL. The sudo maintainer seeking a new sponsor affects upstream velocity and stewardship, not the deployed trust model of enterprise distributions. RHEL does not “follow HEAD.” It vendors a known-good snapshot and assumes long-term responsibility for it.
Core tools like sudo have survived things like this before
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.
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.
It's all bug fixes it seems. What is surprising is that so many bugs remain even after all this time and effort. And no, for the most part these are not the kinds of bugs that are squashed by a rewrite in Rust.
Things have changed quite a bit in the past 30 years!
I encourage you to peek at their changelog (https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/) for more insight into why this project is still under active development.
Living without it isn't hard IMO. It's more of a convenience. Most of the servers I ever login to only have one non-root user anyway. When I need root, I switch to root.
I wonder how many guys who have have written or significantly maintained "household name" level FOSS products just earn a corporate sinecure somewhere as hypercompetent remote sysadmins or ICs or something. Folks who don't necessarily care to earn top dollar, with all the headaches that entails, but also almost never have to actually work more than 2 hours in a given day to keep the ship going, and the arrangement is just so cozy and gives them enough time to themselves to work on their actual passion that they accept the arrangement.
I know of at least one recruiter who does something like this and specializes in greybeard hiring, and it seems like a steady niche if you have the network to pull it off.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In your example certbot is given permission to write to /var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge and to write certs somewhere. Your web server also has permission to read those files too.
There is no need for the acme client and web server to run as the same user. For reloads the certbot user can be given permission to just invoke the reload command / signal directly. There does not need to be sudo in between them.
But, on the whole, the server seems to be doing well enough for something near the top of HN. The website is served by nginx and appears to be mostly static pages.
> This project is not a fork of the Unix/Linux sudo project, nor is it a port of that sudo project. Instead, Sudo for Windows is a Windows-specific implementation of the sudo concept.
It's genuinely terrifying to think how much of the modern internet rests on the shoulders of a few people maintaining core utilities like sudo, curl, and openssl for decades. Todd is a legend.
Have used sudo millions of times. It's so smooth I don't even consider it software. Thinking that sudo could give me bug one day haunts me now. Thanks Miller for your work!
There are at least two catches with micropayment ideas. One is transaction costs. The other is taxation.
If person in country X is accepting payments (micro or regular) directly from customers/donors in country Y they are then running an international business. That can have income tax, sale tax, VAT, and probably other tax collecting and reporting requirements in one or both countries.
It's a big can of worms you probably don't want to deal with unless you are making significant money from Y. Multiply all that by the number of different countries you get paid from.
The best way to fix the transaction fee problem is probably to use an intermediary. For micropayments people (payers and payees) have accounts at the intermediary. Payers preload their account with a payment large enough that the transaction fees are only a tiny percentage, then can direct how that money is distributed. On the payee side the intermediary waits until the payer has received enough to be able to do a transfer to the payees bank account without transaction fees eating too much.
The intermediary can also fix the tax problem. The way that works is that the intermediary operates as a legal entity in both country X and Y. Payers interact solely with the legal entity in their country, and payees interact solely with the legal entity in their country. Payers and payees then only have to deal with their own country's tax system.
The problem here is who should run the intermediary service? I doubt people will be able to agree on that. What we probably need is a system where there can be multiple intermediary services, but the services talk to each other so if say I want to donate to project Foo and Foo and I use different services I tell mine to send Foo a micropayment and my service and Foo's service make that happen.
This could work similar to the way peering works on the internet backbone.
Sounds like we need an open source index fund where you can make one payment that goes into a pool of money which is invested into the top 1000 open source projects.
It almost seems like someone ought to be able to build some kind of digital currency with low transaction fees and no centralized payment processor that could power microtransactions. I wonder why nobody has done that yet.
I know crypto was supposed to solve this problem, but I’ve never seen an implementation that actually did the job. You’d think someone would have built a successful “Patreon for micropayments” in the past 10 years, but no one has.
Yeah I think the problem is that most of the main chains had astronomical transaction fees; most of the side chains that solved this problem had a trust problem; and Bitcoin Lightning was sorta dead on arrival, though it had both the trust and the technology solution. At that point, this forum had already moved BTC from "amazing new technology" to "huge threat to social order and environment".
Sounds like the above 2 ideas should be combined.
Lightning payments are more or less free, and an index or tracker that looks at your bash history could make it possible to spread 5$ per month over all projects that you use.
Why? If every person participating is giving $10-$20 per month to tens or hundreds of projects and then once distributed, this equates to $x00 or $x000/project/month, why would the payment processors mind. Of course, it's all in theory.
This is why I feel like a missing piece of Patreon/Kofi/whatever is the ability to say "Here's $x; divide it automagically amongst the creators I'm currently following"
Sure, I think a lot of those donations would amount to a few pennies or so at once, but I feel like a lot more people would be willing to support creators if they didn't have to constantly choose which to support.
I would love it if something like Github would accept donations from a repo and parcel it out to the repo's dependencies somehow. It would sadly make Github even stickier, but it would be a great feature.
I would love to know were IBM is on this. They use sudo everywhere, even on AIX. Not to mention IBM owns Red Hat Linux.
IBM should be able to send a decent amount to Todd once in a while, but based upon how much IBM supports ssh ($0), all they are proving is they are very cheap and only wants be a parasite living off other's work.
may also fund retirements for certain individuals, and there is for sure enough free juice to get it started in a very reasonable way. these people really deserve it, the same way Nobels extist, etc.
I've said it before, open source works poorly in this area. It's great if everyone's getting paid fat money in a day job and can maintain their pet project a few days a month, but that's just not true for a lot of people.
It's disgusting that maintainers of critical projects have to go through the humiliation of begging for money, and absurd to suggest they all hang out Kofi or PAtreon banners. Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally. I'm baffled that some entity like the Linux Software Foundation isn't administering this already.
I wonder if a few people going beyond what is reasonable, is representative of open source projects.
For a lot of open source projects, if you have a normal day job and spend a few hours per week on a project, then the project just never gets very big. It exists, may have a few users. But on a larger scale, nobody knows it exists.
The exceptions are projects where developers spend a lot of time on the project at the expense of a day job. Though there is the possibility that they may have a hard time having a day job in the first place, which may have let to the situation with the open source project.
In general, I think we do have a culture problem where we think projects need to be successful. And people working on a project 'need' to support users (who in general don't pay).
And that expectation of free work happens throughout the open source ecosystem as well. Distributions expect projects to fix bugs for free. Open source projects expect libraries and compilers to be maintained.
Ultimately, change has to come from people who refuse to work for free. Doing something as a hobby for free is perfectly fine. As long as it stays within the scope of a hobby project.
I think this is partly an education problem, and partly an industry culture problem. Lots of young developers are incentivized to 'contribute' to open-source as a way to demonstrate that they can actually write software. So open-source becomes a way of signalling competence when at a broader scale it's just extracting wealth from the vulnerable.
Open-source seems to be fragmented into three groups now. Large enterprise open-source like Kubernetes or OpenStack where the license seems more like a legal agreement amongst vendors to not sue each other. Legacy open-source projects that are getting by on brand recognition and sheer willpower. And a whole bunch of noise from people who are looking to leverage open-source into a job of some sort.
> Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally.
Not if we don't make it easy for them. I had Claude whip up fundcli a while ago, but this post got me to finally upload it. It goes through your http://atuin.sh/ history (raw .bash_history/.*history doesn't have enough information) and generates links to projects for you to donate to.
git clone https://github.com/fragmede/fundcli
uv run src/fundcli/cli.py analyze
uv run ./src/fundcli donate --amount 100
to get links to donate $100 for last month's usage. There's also http://thanks.dev if you're looking for other places to donate to based on your open source usage.
I feel like this should have been the responsibility of investors and venture capitalists. In a normal society, the moneyed folks should give special treatment to the folks who have proven themselves to be effective givers.
Unfortunately, it seems like either the moneyed folks don't care or the current financial structure simply does not support this.
Look again at the xkcd comic (I did before posting the comment). The sandwich-making person is not obviously female, in fact he(?) looks rather male according to xkcd convention.
This is why Big Tech is so desperate for AI to work as a wholesale replacement for software developers: they do not pay for their Open Source consumption as-is, and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do.
The fact that sudo is a critical security pillar for trillions of dollars of global infrastructure but this guy gets bupkis for it screams volumes about the current state of technology.
We must do better, or it’ll be closed systems (OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle) all the way down as maintainers age out, go bankrupt, or die without succession plans in place.
Why should something like sudo not be "done" after 30 years?
Sudo is one of the poster children for creeping featuritis, to the point that the sudoers man page is a meme ("Don't despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF ...")
Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).
> Why should something like sudo not be "done" after 30 years?
Because new needs arise over time. For example, when I started in IT the "sudoedit" functionality was not present and so allowing someone to do "sudo vi …" would allow them breakout of the editor when it was running as root.
With sudoedit you can give people permissions to edit particular files with elevated permissions.
> Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).
They did not "give up": they found they needed only much simpler functionality shipped in the base OS. For example, sudo has functionality to talk to LDAP (which I've used at multiple jobs over the years), but is not needed for a local-only box. Once you need centralized account and privilege management, doas becomes much less useful.
> I can't remember the name, but I read about a rust project a few months ago which claimed that even doas had too much feature creep.
Features are added because people cannot do X and want to, and so it is added.
I'm happy to have a spectrum of privilege-escalation utilities of varying capabilities, but just because one person does not need certain functionality (like talking to LDAP) does not mean I don't.
Different platform but the simplest mainframe utility IEFBR14, a noop process to trigger JCL events started as one instruction. Then two. Then debate started about which machine instruction should be used to set the return code to zero …
Bugfixes and security vulnerabilities, mostly. So long as fallible humans make fallible hardware running fallible software that in turn executes and/or compiles fallible code, there will always be a need for continued development of critical tooling and packages.
On a long enough timeline, those fixes become fewer and less frequent as the codebase improves, but there is no "done" in software unfortunately. Hell, entropy itself means nothing is ever done, just in an ever-changing state.
Is it really creeping, though? Pretty sure I first saw the EBNF in the man page more than 20 years ago, it's just how that generation learned to write and discuss parsers. (What I'm getting at is that even if it is, that isn't a sign of it.)
Of course, 20+ years ago a big feature was platform compatibility, and since then we've gone from 10+ to 2ish, so if it's not explicitly enabling retrocomputing, it should be getting simpler, right?
Even if sudo itself never changed, the system around it changes pretty drastically. I agree the scope of the tool should be smaller and it violates the Unix philosophy (whatever that is worth these days)
This community and others like it are so weird in that if they see something as stable as sudo but without recent commits, rather than conclude that it's solid and doesn't need further changes, they see it as some kind of a problem and want to switch to something that's seen major changes in the last week.
Maybe that's somehow related to why so many companies are shoving AI into a bunch of stuff that doesn't need it. Gotta keep everything on the hype train. Working and fulfilling people's needs is no longer good enough.
The thing is, there is next to no software that "doesn't need further changes" at all. There is always something, sure it might be infrequent and/or most of the time nothing really big or difficult (except sometimes) but the point is: someone needs to step up and do it.
If a see a project with recent activity, best from multiple people it is a strong signal that this will happen, if the last commit is a year ago I must assume it's completely abandoned because most of the time it just is. Sometimes it's clearly communicated that it is the way because the authors see it as essentially feature complete, there are some examples of this but not that many honestly.
Because we haven't progressed to the angelic level of software development, so nothing is bug-free, which especially important in something security-critical like sudo
I'm not sure what can be gained for further development of the OG c sudo, add security patches of course.
But fund adding yet another feature 99.9% of users will never use? I can't fathom the justification for that. Just adding attack surface at this point.
Rightly both doas and the *-rs drops ins intend to drop most of those unnecessary features.
Are you saying you would be using something that fills the same critical role as sudo even if it had not received any updates in a decade or more? Because that sounds insane
What if the exploitative aspect is open source itself? Trick some above average but naive developers into giving their talent, effort, insights and time away for free or very little? Maybe open source or something similar could have been organized in a way that wasn't exploitative and wasn't (possibly) unsustainable, but that is not how things ended up with what Richard Stallman and others organized.
All of this is true, but ironically Free Software is about ensuring people have control over their computers, and Open Source spun the narrative to make it about getting software cheap or without paying at all.
People having control over their computer (and even having the right to share what they run on their computer!) is completely compatible with people paying for software labor.
No it isn't. People having control over their own computer is in direct contradiction with people paying for software labor. In an honest world, sure, but in reality, people don't want to pay for shit and are going to steal from you. The Pirate Bay is still running and isn't going away. So is Anna's archive.
There can be "cynical greedy bastards" in many places. If you optimize against them in one regard and place, will you also handle them elsewhere well? And calling for change can be abused by some of them to open new opportunities for exploitation, this time benefitting some different group of them.
You need to have an alternative, and it needs to be a credible and reliable one, to ensure that it does not end up being the case that one scam is replaced with another scam.
I really think that criminal theory needs to progress. We differentiate between say consensual intimacy and rape and we don't let the existence of sexual abusive people set the terms for our romantic encounters.
We have carved out a class of engagements, labeled it deeply asocial, criminalized it and now we pursue people who engage in it through legal means.
Business really doesn't have this. Personal example - last week I was at a place where the business owner tried to overcharge me by an order of magnitude and then verbally attacked me when I caught him and backed out of the transaction.
His google and yelp reviews are full of people claiming false charges and all kinds of fraud, refusal to correct and repeated abuse until they closed their cards. It's wildly obvious what's going on here and I was on the ball enough to catch it.
I contacted the police and they said "well you should call the BBB or something". It's dozens of reviews of clear credit card fraud and for some reason because he's a merchant, doesn't seem to hit the radar.
These are purely criminal matters - people acting habitually in bad faith with ill intent in a brazenly dishonest manner.
Whether it's plundering the commons, polluting the public discourse, or breaking other types of social compacts, these should be treated the same as any other crime.
Does your country allow suing him for a large monetary amount? Have you talked to the media? A lawyer? Maybe together with others? Made it as easy as possible for the police to get him, paper trail, receipts and all?
You do have points, though, but there might at least be some actions that you and others can take in this case. Maybe a medium change like changing the law on this specific point might make sense.
I'm not law enforcement. This shouldn't be my job. If I see someone robbing a store with a mask on and a gun I should be able to call the police, report it, and hand it off.
If there's an accumulation of complaints against this merchant then that should warrant an investigation.
The police have like half the local city budget, can't they do their job?
The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free.
There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with.
But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
The code can become "radioactive" as well when a software library goes paid. It starts phoning home with information about its environment to ensure compliance which is just kinda... icky to most devs. I certainly don't want that bloat in my dependencies.
This is an upfront cost and is possibly a one-time cost per-agreement.
Practically nobody downloads and installs sudo directly from the project website; people install it with their distribution of choice. The agreement could be automated and included in the licensing process. ie: the license gives specific distributions access to the software (either via paid or other agreed-upon terms appropriate to the distribution) and perhaps individual licensing terms for non-commercial entities.
Of course, the bigger ask in this decade is in use for training LLMs. OSS shouldn't be laundered through an LLM (IMHO) for license avoidance. Maybe some projects are OK with that (eg: many BSD licensed works.) There are some that likely aren't.
> The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website),
That seems like an area that's ripe for innovation. What does it take to get setup on a platform like Patreon? Seems like something similar ought to be setup for open source/independent development, probably an idealistic nonprofit.
> and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
All the organizations who really ought to pay are already setup to do all that, and do it all the time.
> But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
What we need is innovation. Maybe a license that has a trip-wire? If not enough money is voluntarily deposited into a tip jar over a certain period of time, the license requires a modest payment from all for-profit organizations of a particular size.
That's up-front, is for the most part free, and incentivizes some payment.
I think you have good arguments, but I wonder if there are alternatives that could work in at least some cases. Like, how Unreal engine's license works. Source-available to game developers, but in theory limited to paying customers, or something along those lines.
A change in economic system might be neither sufficient nor necessary, especially if the new economic system turns out to be even worse, or a scam.
One approach is to have expectations to not only the economic system, but also other systems, and the different people involved, no matter if they're on the top, on the bottom, or somewhere in the middle.
Not trying to be glib here. This feels like the embrace, extend, extinguish pattern that we jokingly used to think was only Microsoft. It is now becoming more and more obviously the modus operandi of the entire enterprise software ecosystem.
I believe you are correct to be frustrated and ringing the alarm bell. This is a "death of the commons" moment for OSS.
> and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do.
What about the Rust rewrite (sudo-rs)? I think it shows people are interested in maintaining and/or modernizing tools taken for granted.
It has a more lax license AFAIK. Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes.
Edit:
To specify, new projects like sudo-rs may seem promising, but going by observation and experience with similar projects, there is no guarantee that sudo-rs and similar projects will be successful, good and continued to be maintained. The problems with old projects can end up applying to new projects as well. And projects in Rust are no exception, going by experience with existing, older Rust projects.
Aside, a pet peeve I have is that for instance Ruffle has not turned out as successful as I had hoped for, even after several years and many sponsors. The proprietary Flash runtimes written in C still outperform Ruffle greatly in some cases, causing problems for some users that want to use Ruffle instead of other runtimes.
If there are 1000 projects that aren't sudo-rs but are similarly load bearing, and they have all been abandoned/in so-so shape, you're right that it doesn't actually say anything about sudo-rs, but there's a highly probable outcome that will be inferred by most people. Incorrectly or otherwise.
How is this a counter argument for anything? A more permissive license is not inherently a bad thing. Many C and C++ projects are also abandon or in so-so condition, why you uniquely call out Rust makes little sense. Either sudo-rs fills the void or it doesn't, but it is a counter point to this idea that open source projects have no path of evolution. Just because that path doesn't look like how you want it to doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I've always favored the view that digital goods are only scarce until they are released. if we had a market for patch releases once they hit some goal. Uses could tip to reach the goal. After the goal is reached the patch is released and to all. Still have free loaders but one might live on the work
Honestly, it seems like the idealism of open source shouldn't have survived its contact with capitalism, but I suppose the contact wasn't painful enough the the exploitation continued for a long time.
Maybe we need a license that's even more onerous to corporations than the AGPL, like something with a revenue share clause.
Or maybe the problem is the naivete of software engineers. In aggregate, there was so much embrace of libertarianism that no groundwork was laid to protect ourselves from things like AI and offshoring.
Been pitching that with my FOSS colleagues and peers for years, now. A license for individual and educational use, but pay-to-play for anyone tangentially making revenue from its use. Then the conversation boils down to the business engineering of how much should something cost, with some arguing for flat yearly rates, and others arguing for cost-per-unit, while others still fret about "disrupting" the status quo immediately after acknowledging its untenability.
It's...frustrating, but those who do the work are the most qualified to explain what they need. For the rest of us, it's encouraging them to seek reasonable compensation for their work from those who exploit it for profit, and that doing so doesn't necessarily go against the spirit of open source.
I don't mean to come across as far too cynical, but in what world has a software license ever stopped the greedy and powerful from pillaging the IP of other people smaller and weaker than them?
In my opinion, libertarianism in software is a hollow dream that leads people to make foolish decisions that can't be protected. This makes it easy for corporations to exploit and quash any barely audible opposition.
Almost as if by plan, the libertarian mindset has eroded and weakened open source protections, defanging and declawing it every step of the way.
Quote from Website: "For the past 30+ years I’ve been the maintainer of sudo. I’m currently in search of a sponsor to fund continued sudo maintenance and development. If you or your organization is interested in sponsoring sudo, please let me know."
But today people can just vibe code their own sudo "with blackjack and hookers!"
/s
Really though, it is remarkable just how high we've built this towering house of cards on the selfless works of individuals. The geek in me immediately begins meditating on OSS funding mechanisms I've seen in the past, and what might work today. Then I remember that I don't believe it can work, but hope desperately that people like Todd can keep paying rent and continue getting some satisfaction from the efforts.
1: https://www.sudo.ws/releases/devel/
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