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Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

millert.dev

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

#251

Post by atq2119 »

conception wrote: post #107
groby_b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 challenge is that this doesn't really work for community-developed software.

Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?

Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.

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

#252

Post by dannyw »

hobofan wrote: post #234
latexr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely false. I have built tons of tools which are feature complete and continue to work to this day without intervention. Heck, I even have tools I no longer use that people asked me to keep available because they do, and they’ve been chugging along for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary. Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’…

> Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add. Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/adobe-animate-is-shutting-... > for over a decade, no bugs or m…

Yeah, I have a relatively simple script with webUI for organising photos and videos I take on my NAS.

Over the years I’ve had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance.

I’ve also had to spend nearly a whole day fixing the webUI when iOS’s wonderful liquid glass came out.

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

#253

Post by hobofan »

dannyw wrote: post #252
hobofan wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add. Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/adobe-animate-is-shutting-... > for over a decade, no bugs or m…

Yeah, I have a relatively simple script with webUI for organising photos and videos I take on my NAS. Over the years I’ve had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance. I’ve also had to spend nearly a whole day fixing the webUI when iOS’s wonderful liquid glass came out.

How did liquid glass break your Web UI?

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

#254

Post by dannyw »

redog wrote: post #236
rixed wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but that would be even more terrifying if it rested on the whims of some soulless corporation.

ms-sudo to Get-AdministratorPermissionForElevatedSecurityOperations

0xEFF0332: Operation could not be performed due to missing TPM flag.

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

#255

Post by kergonath »

TonyStr wrote: post #207
shimman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Several states fund open science, and a couple of them actually do fund open source projects. Germany has its sovereign tech agency for this; France has publicly-funded research agencies that work on a lot of open source stuff, and there are others. There are EU initiatives as well.

It’s not perfect, but it is already something that is being done.

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

#256

Post by dannyw »

hobofan wrote: post #148
ahartmetz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look again at the xkcd comic (I did before posting the comment). The sandwich-making person is not obviously female, in fact he(?) looks rather male according to xkcd convention.

"make me a sandwich" has been a saying to dismiss women for decades before the xkcd comic existed.

Context always matters. Phrases can also be normalized through everyday use without the negative connections.

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

#257

Post by latexr »

usrbinbash wrote: post #243
latexr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely false. I have built tons of tools which are feature complete and continue to work to this day without intervention. Heck, I even have tools I no longer use that people asked me to keep available because they do, and they’ve been chugging along for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary. Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’…

> Absolutely false. I have built tons of tools which are feature complete and continue to work to this day without intervention And how many of these tools are mission critical to the point that they are installed on almost every Linux box in existence, probably invoked tens of billions of times per day, both by humans and software, and the entire world would be in deep goddamn trouble if there was a serious security…

You’ve moved the goalposts so far away, they’ve left the breathable atmosphere. Look at your condition, it’s over 50 words. I didn’t say “all software can be done”, I just said that it’s not true that software is never done. It’s not a universal truth that applies to all software.

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

#258

Post by dannyw »

hobofan wrote: post #253
dannyw wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a relatively simple script with webUI for organising photos and videos I take on my NAS. Over the years I’ve had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance. I’ve also had to spend nearly a whole day fixing the webUI when iOS’s wonderful liquid glass came out.

How did liquid glass break your Web UI?

Liquid Glass changed dimensions and viewport measurements for fixed position elements, amongst a whole host of positioning related bugs:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79753701/ios-26-safari-w...

Many of the bugs were fixed in 26.1, but still, I had to fix it to use it.

I was surprised that not much of the entire web was broken, but a cursory search of commits showed that the WebKit/Apple team took the approach of coding in site specific hacks for popular sites (eg instagram, google search!) for iOS 26.

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

#259

Post by vanderZwan »

hobofan wrote: post #234
latexr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely false. I have built tons of tools which are feature complete and continue to work to this day without intervention. Heck, I even have tools I no longer use that people asked me to keep available because they do, and they’ve been chugging along for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary. Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’…

> Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add. Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/adobe-animate-is-shutting-... > for over a decade, no bugs or m…

> Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.

Yeah, although "finished" software is antithetical to this always have new features to push onto your customers subscription model, so it's not entirely unrelated.

Having said that I still find it strange. I can imagine it might not be able to ride on the AI bubble, and perhaps animators are especially vocal about not wanting AI in their tools. But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable? They do have a subscription model, and customers, so people are paying for this product.

Compared to other digital art, the data for vector animation takes relatively little space to store. It also requires much less resources to render than other forms of video, and rasterized video output should compress really well compared to alternatives, especially with modern codecs that are not only optimized for regular film. So surely it shouldn't be that expensive to maintain for them compared to all their other projects.

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

#260

Post by [deleted] »

hobofan wrote: post #253
dannyw wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a relatively simple script with webUI for organising photos and videos I take on my NAS. Over the years I’ve had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance. I’ve also had to spend nearly a whole day fixing the webUI when iOS’s wonderful liquid glass came out.

How did liquid glass break your Web UI?

[deleted]
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