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Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

millert.dev

201–210 of 337 posts

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#201
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BAT literally was built for (accumulation of) micropayments.

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#202

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

At the least, all the hyperscalers should be putting money into a fund for this sort of thing.

[deleted]

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, for example, would be a better system. One the GPL would work beautifully in.

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.

It works, but you need real human staff. And we learn from history that we don’t learn which can be harsh.

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#204
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes. Not for profit does not mean they don’t have money. With that logic why should non profits have to pay for anything at all?

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.

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism has entered the chat.

That, for example, would be a better system. One the GPL would work beautifully in.

As a person who had a privilege to live in a commie-block half his life, no, it isn't a better system.

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"relatively" is just a word added to done and the fact that there is a qualifier precludes the word from bearing truth.

Out of curiosity, what changes would it have at this point?

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".

[0]: https://www.wireguard.com/repositories/

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#207
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility. Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.

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.

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 exploita…

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.

Re: Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL is a response to the copyright law, which was created for the big corporations to extract rent from ordinary people. It's copyright law which should go away.

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.

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