121–130 of 337 posts
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
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.
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
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.
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
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. 1: https://www.sudo.ws/releases/devel/
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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 ac…
Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
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You can demand payment but it doesn't mean you'll get paid. These days companies will clone your work instead of paying.
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.
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/i-started-identifying-corporate-...
The post-open source space is indeed a very exciting space in 2026
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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 ac…
Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
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> 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 o…
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.
There's also NTP. The Largely Untold Story Of How One Guy In California Keeps The World’s Computers Running On The Right Time Zone: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-o... https://xkcd.com/2347/
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