261–270 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
> one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure It's really not.
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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.
What's the benefit?
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If he actually did charge money someone else would've written an implementation of sudo to solve their own needs and avoid the overhead of transacting with a random developer.
And then "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software" would apply to that someone.
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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…
What “lack of profitability”? They just reported a record quarter. Adobe shoves full Creative Cloud subscriptions down everyone’s throats; buying one tool, especially when it’s not one of the flagships, is uncommon. What exactly are they losing by just letting Animate be?
> And if it's written in an interpretable language
I have never ever ever had to change shell, Ruby, or JavaScript code because “the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL”. Never. That code keeps happily running, doing its work, with whatever version of the interpreter I have available in whatever box.
> And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
So what? That’s perfectly fine. Do you drink milk out of a baby bottle? Do you ride a bike with training wheels? It’s perfectly fine to build a tool for a purpose and a time and place and let it exist there for the people who care for it. That’s also true of video games (which, lest we forget, are software). In a world where people are constantly complaining about software updates moving shit around, removing features, and adding crap they don’t want, plenty of people appreciate that the things they like continue to work as they always have.
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> one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure It's really not.
How is it not? A suid binary installed on pretty much every Unix system ever seems pretty critical to me.
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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.
> 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?
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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.
But how would that work? There isn’t unlimited money so who decides what software to support with state money and which developers? I don’t have trust in a bureaucracy to decide which developers should get paid to work on sudo. Just look at a the sudo-rs debacle and that’s without money involved.
There's a TLS listener in sudo? This project seems to have a tonne of features it shouldn't.