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
back
13 comments
This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility.
Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.
Google made 10^7 as much money as I did last year. Yea, I don't think it's as simple as you make it seem.
Google sponsors a lot of open source work: https://opensource.google/organizations-we-support
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
I don't think they even see it as their responsibility, more, "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software".
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)"
I mean, he should just put a message when you run sudo the first time asking for funding if he wants it that bad, that should speed things up.
It would be removed by distros. XScreensaver had a notice when user ran old version and Debian removed it.
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.
I would like to live in this utopia where free software is funded by the state. This seems impossible to get implemented in our world though.
No thanks, we don't need yet another specialty tax paid out to a dubious selection of individuals.
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.
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].
[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
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.
Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
> Corporations and robots must pay.
Greenpeace is a (non-profit) corporation. Unions are corporations. Municipalities. Colleges and universities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
Should they have to pay?
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.
Yes. Non-profits are more than capable of abusing the commons, the purpose of even small monetary requirements is to put a bound on that.
If Mozilla and Wikimedia can pay millions in salary to their CEOs, I'm sure that they can spare a few thousands for open source projects.
The behavior of corporations is shameful.
After all, people in these companies don't work for free and are able to spend a lot of money for other services.
You can demand payment but it doesn't mean you'll get paid. These days companies will clone your work instead of paying.
The GPL is a good idea. It's our socieconomic system that isn't.
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.
Wasn't the sudo-rs (rust version) already reducing that leverage even further? (and finding interesting bugs, but that's not the point here)
Surprisingly Jia Tan has not offered to help yet.
Maybe someone should suggest, sudo needs compression capabilities and suggest a great developer, being helpful with that one? :D
Jia Tan and his 40 sockpuppets are undoubtedly trying.
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.
You don't even have to be root all the time, su is all you need unless you have a fetish for software bloat.
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.
[1] not enough people to alter finances
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
Why would it be needed to continue the development of sudo?
Isn't it done and finished, after 30 years of development?
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.
The monthly releases seem to indicate otherwise.
> one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure
It's really not.
How is it not? A suid binary installed on pretty much every Unix system ever seems pretty critical to me.
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2347/
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.
At the least, all the hyperscalers should be putting money into a fund for this sort of thing.
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.
> 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.
Almost everyone is running sudo in production.
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
Auditing.
bro i just want to apt install gimp :(