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> This is something that I would love to see happen with open source projects: That won't happen. But not for lack of trying! My consulting company, Paragon I
by CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
> This is something that I would love to see happen with open source projects:
That won't happen. But not for lack of trying!
My consulting company, Paragon Initiative Enterprises, has produced over a dozen high quality open source projects that make it easier to write secure PHP software.
For starters, we wrote an entire CMS that has secure automatic updates baked into its core as a first-class feature (including for extension developers): https://paragonie.com/project/airship https://paragonie.com/project/airship
Worried about SQL injection? EasyDB makes it easy and intuitive to use prepared statements. https://github.com/paragonie/easydb https://github.com/paragonie/easydb
Need Content-Security-Policy headers quickly and easily? You want CSP-Builder: https://paragonie.com/project/csp-builder https://paragonie.com/project/csp-builder
Want all the security of libsodium with an even simpler interface and a separate class for dealing with the filesystem? Check out Halite: https://paragonie.com/project/halite https://paragonie.com/project/halite
Want to stop CSRF (including replay attacks)? https://github.com/paragonie/anti-csrf https://github.com/paragonie/anti-csrf
Want to quickly examine the differences between two PHP Archives (e.g. for reproducible builds)? https://github.com/paragonie/pharaoh https://github.com/paragonie/pharaoh
We even wrote the community's accepted interface for generating cryptographically secure random numbers in PHP 5 projects: https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat
And coming soon (pending an audit), a pure-PHP implementation of libsodium that will likely be adopted by WordPress so its automatic updates are Ed25519 secured: https://github.com/paragonie/sodium_compat https://github.com/paragonie/sodium_compat
And even more: https://paragonie.com/projects https://paragonie.com/projects
Guess how many clients we've gotten from all this open source software we wrote over the past two years that demonstrably improves the security posture of software written in PHP?
Zero.
My solution: Our next project isn't going to be OSS, and it's unlikely that any of our future ones will be unless it's intended to be a giveaway.
The open source + consulting business model may sound good in theory, but it simply doesn't work. (Though, I will grant that it's possible that the "consulting about someone else's open source project" is more sustainable, due to near-zero investment in said project itself.)
- omouse 10y agoThe reason I mentioned it is because it has worked for Wordpress, Drupal and Magento in general. There's countless shops that build plugins and themes for those and are hired for things ranging from small changes to full-scale development. I would love to see that happen with Sandstorm or other projects because maybe the consulting model doesn't work for the parent company but I'm sure there's hundreds of smaller consulting firms that would love to support it.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agoGenerally if a whale ends up dead on a beach lots of parasites feast upon its bloated corpse. But that's not to say we need more beached whales.
- bureado 10y agoThe consulting model was decent 10 years ago but it's lousy today. It will come back in 5 years or so but as a model it isn't very different than non-open source professional services. So the question is how does open source advance in the face of these cycles and I think your point is that even if some folks can make some marginal profit at a particular point in time due to the way money flows in open source, the ecosystem doesn't advance much as the project governance is tied to the whims of the consulting business.