It’s hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.
Funding or not, Miller expects sudo-rs to become the next generation of the tool in coming years.
“Ubuntu is already shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo command in their latest versions,” Miller told us. “I’ve been in contact with the people working on sudo-rs since the project started and I trust them to do right by the sudo user base.”
Projects don’t last forever, and when they inevitably end, it’s an opportunity to switch to something newer and hopefully better. Sudo coming to an end, if it does, will just force people onto alternatives.
Being open source, sudo will always exist, whether someone else wants to maintain it, fork it, use it as-is, or just reference it. It’s because it’s open source that it can serve a purpose even beyond its EOL.
Anyway, sudo’s not dead yet, so there’s still plenty of time for people to look at what’s out there. Some distros have already moved to, or are considering moving to, alternatives like
sudo-rs, so I’d expect that to continue.Don’t tap Jia Tan…
imagine if he said fuck it and turned sudo into a crypto mining malware
To be honest, it wouldn’t take much for distro maintainers to detect that and stop it
$udosudo rm $(which sudo)Lulz would be had.
It’s been 12 years since Heartbleed and we’ve had numerous ”lone maintainer” issues since then. The situation shouldn’t come as a surprise or be especially ”hard to believe”.
This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.
Unless the creators manage to roll some kind of ”commercial” version, it’s not very sustainable in the long run. Turns out many eyes don’t really equal many PRs
This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.
The state of free software also includes the fact that even if the
sudomaintainer doesn’t find support, no one steps up andsudobecomes unmaintained,sudo-rs,doas,opendoas,run0andpleasealready exist as alternatives.and let’s not forget - systemd, which has RedHat money backing it up.
In my experience a lot of these old projects really go out of their way to dissuade contributions anyway. Lots of naysaying “it’s always been like that”, ancient infrastructure - e.g. insisting on
git send-emailpatches, etc.Usually the only way it gets resolved is when someone writes a more modern competitor and it starts gaining traction. Suddenly all those improvements that people tried to do and were told were impossible and stupid aren’t such a bad idea after all.
I don’t think that’s the case with Unity but it probably is with things like GCC, sudo, sysvinit, X11, etc.
That Ubuntu unity article where the maintainer was a 10 year old when he started the project but now has shit to do is pretty funny.
Please link article thanks
This has been depressing for a while now. I’m a big Unity fan and I’m concerned about the future.
“Maybe someone could teach us how things are done so that we can take it over in time,” Adamietz added.
Wasn’t any of this documented anywhere? And who are these other team members they interviewed? How is it they don’t know how to write code? Are they just manual testers or something?
I’d try to help myself if there was some decent documentation on where to begin. But if it’s all in this kids head, we might be kinda fucked.
It reminds me somehow on the famous xkcd webcomic: https://xkcd.com/2347
Edit for an addition: Maybe it’s also a reminder that we should frequently donate when we use FOSS.
Also relevant:
Really? You want to post slop on Lemmy? That’s what went through your brain? That’s what you considered a good enough idea that you’d execute it?
Not just AI slop but a right wing dog whistle as AI slop.
And also… Completely irrelevant to the discussion. What’s the connection?
It’s not a dog whistle when its meaning is plainly and purposefully obvious.
Pretty sure the usage of an ai generated meme makes you one of the weak
The third frame here needs to be the same businessman in increasingly more fancy suits or gold or other gaudy-ass shit.
Yeah, the transition from the third frame to the fourth frame just doesn’t make sense as currently depicted; why would people playing video games suddenly start to revolt?
However, if the third frame were to depict rich men getting richer as you suggest, then the revolt in the fourth frame would make more sense.
You’re putting way too much thought into analyzing AI slop
damnit it got mee tooooooooooooo
i not looking at anything but darkwing duck from now on
I can get with that. More darkwing duck, less beans
According to the above Robert Manner and AZero13 also have one contribution each. There’s also the https://opencollective.com/sudo-project which has a board.
If Todd wants to pass off the project he has all the resources to do this.
Join us. Use doas.
Still a setuid bin. 🥺
No. I just use the default on my system. Hopefully sudo-rs will become the default.
Just waiting for another xz utils situation
The fact that the FOSS model is still considered the best thing ever is so sad to me. The “free” part is clearly not working. Or rather it is working as is now intended: free labour for the private sector to exploit.
The Telekommunist Manifesto for the longer version of this 🙃
How is the free part not working? FOSS is the cure of the industry. Or do you think Adobe and Microsoft is working that great? Imagine if we didn’t have FOSS…
Funny, you are using with lemmy something for free, which is to some extent in the spirit of FOSS.
I’m not so sure the “open source” part is working either when you think about how AI tools were trained.
It’s really sad, because the accessibility of developing software and collaborative nature of the open source community is a big part of what drew me to software engineering as a career, and it’s always been one of the first things I mention about why I love it. But, of course, these fucking evil companies found a way to take every individual part of something good and twist it into something awful.
FOSS will always be incompatible with capitalism. There is no incentive for the capitalist class to pay for the open source they consume.
Wrong. In example Valve is putting money and work into FOSS. AND they make money of it and rely on it. Even Microsoft does contribute to Open Source, believe it or not, even is one of the top sponsors for Linux.
There has been the “4opens” criteria, that has been more on point than free/libre/open source.
In hindsight, defeating corporate and AI piggery might have needed single-maintainer closed source with open protocols. Software components? Maybe it would have led to the compound document model instead of the app model, architecturally enforcing openness.
With the push to immutable distros and flatpak I wonder how long we will need sudo.
Not gonna lie, kinda blame systemd for this. The more utilities they swallow the more funding gets concentrated to the RedHat folks, and the less freedom you have to choose different software. They’ve certainly made some improvements in specific utilities, but there is an invisible cost of centralization
It doesn’t seem any money that the sudo developer had received was redirected to systemd, even though systemd has its own sudo called run0, with interesting features such as limiting the amount of memory or CPU a command it runs can use. His employer supported sudo as his side project while he was employed to work on something else. The funding from big tech is instead going to the Rust rewrite, sudo-rs and other projects of its community.
About
run0, isn’t it also not a setuid binary?Iirc sudo-rs was still setuid…
I didn’t mean they were directly responsible for him losing the sponsorship, just that it has made it harder to find new ones.
If my memory serves this isn’t the first time systemd has moved into a space and the existing infrastructure has withered away. Vaguely thinking udev or logind, but its not so much a critique as a worry. I’ve played with OpenRc, RunIt, and Upstart over the years, and I want them to remain viable alternatives
