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Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

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

#321

Post by aboardRat4 »

saubeidl wrote: post #316
aboardRat4 wrote: post #159

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.

GPL is much more than that. It is distributing the means of production to the tech workers. rms is the Marx of the 20th Century. GPL is freedom from corporate oppression.

No it's not. GPL is quite the opposite. GPL means that "you own what you buy", which is the foundation of capitalism. You own what you buy, including programs, which you can buy, replicate, modify, and sell.

Due to the nature of software, especially in the 80s, it existed in both text and binary form, which made it easy to perverse the nature of selling software from selling code to selling binaries, and big companies went even further in their collusion with the government socialists by making even re-selling even your own binaries illegal.

GPL is just trying to fight this madness with its own weapon. The GPL is an attempt to go back to capitalism of small business owners and individual service providers.

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

#322

Post by saidnooneever »

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…

its really funny people are so adamant on this while software written for linux 1 still work on linux 6. it is a developers choice to burden themselves with every changing foundations... maybe not the wisest choices in the long run to go for easy things in the short run..

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

#323

Post by jibal »

david-gpu wrote: post #309
jibal wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism worked in China, for some definition of "worked". Stalinism eventually failed in the USSR and elsewhere. An extensive literature explains these things, as well as explaining different forms and varieties of "communism", and things that people call "communism" but aren't.

Communism worked so well in China that as soon as they adopted something resembling free markets in some regions, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, their GDP per capita rose amazingly fast for 3~4 decades. Not exactly a stellar example.

China is still communist. Again communism has worked for some definition of "worked". This is an objective statement, not an endorsement of Chinese communism.

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

#324

Post by saubeidl »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #321
saubeidl wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL is much more than that. It is distributing the means of production to the tech workers. rms is the Marx of the 20th Century. GPL is freedom from corporate oppression.

No it's not. GPL is quite the opposite. GPL means that "you own what you buy", which is the foundation of capitalism. You own what you buy, including programs, which you can buy, replicate, modify, and sell. Due to the nature of software, especially in the 80s, it existed in both text and binary form, which made it easy to perverse the nature of selling software from selling code to selling binaries, and big companie…

Going from the capitalism of small business owners to the market socialism of coops is a small step ;)

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

#325

Post by AlexeyBelov »

bsnnkv wrote: post #294
Aurornis wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Releasing open source software and then “demanding payment” goes against everything about open source. If someone expects to be paid for the use of their software, releasing it as open source is not what they want. If a maintainer of a software project starts trying to demand payment or threatening to change license terms, it’s a reasonable response for a company to fork it or build their own solution.

And this is why all new projects by independent developers should seriously consider using a post-open source license before defaulting to corporate-friendly/corporate-first OSI licenses

I think they should expect payment from the job they're working, not opensource or "post-opensource" work.

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

#326

Post by vanderZwan »

hobofan wrote: post #311
vanderZwan wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable? Sorry, I wasn't precise with my wording. What I meant to say was "less profitable than the perceived AI opportunities they could do with the same engineers".

Ah, ok. Even then switching Animate into "maintenance mode" should be doable on a shoestring budget methinks but whatever, the more Adobe hurts itself the better tbh.

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

#327

Post by amai »

burkaman wrote: post #305
amai wrote: post #302

Only recently sudo got copied by Microsoft for Windows 11: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/advanced-settings/sudo/ I guess they didn't pay a cent to Todd Miller.

https://github.com/microsoft/sudo?tab=readme-ov-file#relatio... > This project is not a fork of the Unix/Linux sudo project, nor is it a port of that sudo project. Instead, Sudo for Windows is a Windows-specific implementation of the sudo concept.

They copied the name and the concept. The rest is probably AI-generated code.

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

#328

Post by phorkyas82 »

latexr wrote: post #225
hobofan wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Done" software is a myth they tell to young developers so that they can sleep easy at night.

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’…

I always had this: "Only dead software needs no maintenance" in the back of my head, and similarly "bug free only means it's not been used and vetted enough"

While probing into this, I think there could be a case where software is mostly done: when it is shipped with the hardware and run in an isolated environment.

The mentioned tools are probably not distributed in binary form for different OS, I assume, otherwise that statement _cannot_ be true.

> failing to to finish software indicates a badly defined scope. In my first job there'd even been a contractual penalty if you are not done in time. And this company produced examples of "finished" software, that controlled warehouse material flow, sometimes running on 20 yrs old MCU. (which of course meant they could not extract money of these customers, because the software ran too good)

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

#330

Post by alt227 »

hobofan wrote: post #117
alt227 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO rust rewrites are done quickly to gain attention and kudos. They are very rarely maintainted to the same quality of the originals.

Yes, I'm sure they also founded a whole foundation[0] to do that just for "attention and kudos". [0]: https://trifectatech.org/

Are 'they' the same people who are responsible for every 'rewritten in rust' post here on HN?
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