Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.
Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.
Pretty bad is also that it intersects with another problem: Bus factor.
Having just one person as maintainer of a library is pretty bad. All it takes is one accident and no one knows how to maintain it.
So, you’re encouraged to add more maintainers to your project.
But yeah, who do you add, if it’s a security-critical project? Unless you happen to have a friend that wants to get in on it, you’re basically always picking a stranger.
At risk of sounding tone deaf to the situation that caused this: that’s what community is all about. The likelihood you know the neighbors you’ve talked to for years is practically nil. Your boss, your co-workers, your best friend and everyone you know, has some facet to them you have never seen. The unknown is the heart of what makes something strange.
We must all trust someone, or we are alone.
Finding strangers to collaborate with, who share your passions, is what makes society work. The internet allows you ever greater access to people you would otherwise never have met, both good and bad.
Everyone you’ve ever met was once a stranger. To make them known, extend blind trust, then quietly verify.
honestly these people should be getting paid if a corporation wants to use a small one-man foss project for their own multibillion software. the lawyer types in foss could put that in GPLv5 or something whenever we feel like doing it.
also hire more devs to help out!
If you think people are going to be trustworthy just because they are getting paid you are naive.
not trustworthy per se but maybe less overworked and inclined to review code more hastily, or less tired and inclined to have the worse judgement that makes such a project more vulnerable to stuff like this.
these people maintain the basis of our entire software infrastructure thanklessly for us in between the full time jobs they need to survive, this has to change.
as for trust in foss projects, the community will often notice bad faith code just like they just did (and very quickly this time, i might add!)
I guess you are using trust in a different way here. Trust in competency can vary with both volunteer and paid workers, everyone makes mistakes though. Trust that someone doesn’t do something deliberately malicious is a different matter though.
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I think bus factor would be a lot easier to cope with than a slowly progressing, semi-abandoned project and a White Knight saviour.
In a complete loss of a sole maintainer, then it should be possible to fork and continue a project. That does require a number of things, not least a reliable person who understands the codebase and is willing to undertake it. Then the distros need to approve and change potentially thousands of packages that rely upon the project as a dependency.
Maybe, before a library or any software gets accepted into a distro, that distro does more due diligence to ensure it’s a sustainable project and meets requirements like a solid ownership?
The inherited debt from existing projects would be massive, and perhaps this is largely covered already - I’ve never tried to get a distro to accept my software.
Nothing I’ve seen would completely avoid risk. Blackmail upon an existing developer is not impossible to imagine. Even in this case, perhaps the new developer in xz started with pure intentions and they got personally compromised later? (I don’t seriously think that is the case here though - this feels very much state sponsored and very well planned)
It’s good we’re asking these questions. None of them are new, but the importance is ever increasing.
And who is supposed to do that work? How do you know you can trust them?
Fair point.
If the distro team is compromised, then that leaves all their users open too. I’d hope that didn’t happen, but you’re right, it’s possible.
https://xkcd.com/2347/