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Current approach of commercial and non-commercial organizations to make "critical" FOSS projects fit their (or public) security, code quality, etc standards is
by xvilka 4y ago
Current approach of commercial and non-commercial organizations to make "critical" FOSS projects fit their (or public) security, code quality, etc standards is doomed to fail. They focus on sheer force or, sometimes, incentives to developers. What part is often overlooked - is the tools, software and legal, to make such moves easier and practical. Recent GitHub and GitLab developments helped to setup static code analysis for many, also security advisories management. Another good example is the OSSFuzz software/program, it helped many developers to understand what fuzzing is, how to use it for eliminating easy bugs, and ease of setup for your project. This is a step in a right direction but still somewhat patchy experience hinders these developments. They should focus more on making it as easy for FOSS maintainers as possible, in uniform way across the ecosystem of languages, frameworks, infrastructures. In commercial world we have mandatory certification and audits, enforced standards, etc. That would never work in FOSS world, since often the "user perspective" of jumping through hoops to get the desired compliance status is absolutely horrendous. Organizations like OpenSSF should focus on making their standards and such void of legalese and compliance-speak, make them as easy as possible to understand for every developer: from JS to C++, from Web frontend to the embedded, from console tools to huge distributed computation softwares. From what I see, this is not what is happening.
- xvilka 4y agoWith the growing army of opensource developers (and also for benefit of commercial ones) we should coin the new term - MX (Maintainer experience, analogous to developer experience), who would devote all their time to make daily life of sole developers and maintainers easier.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThat's brilliant ! I love it - it perfectly encapsulates some commercial issues i have been seeing too