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Really, it starts before things get bad. This thing where - in the famous XKCD example - a single guy is thanklessly maintaining a project for 20 years in Nebra

Really, it starts before things get bad. This thing where - in the famous XKCD example - a single guy is thanklessly maintaining a project for 20 years in Nebraska needs to stop. Software libraries like these are no longer a one-person job. They can't be for the bus factor alone. Major projects like Linux distros or bigger foundations like Apache or Mozilla need to start harping on people hard to contribute to important libraries. We'll get to whatever the buzzword of the day is once we do the important work first. Find a way to make it happen. Sorry, "I just can't" isn't going to cut it after this.

Denvercoder9 3y ago
I agree we need to stop depending on the 20-year hobby project of the guy in Nebraska, but adding barriers (which requiring travel and in-person meetings is) to sharing the load is not the solution. What these projects need is the necessary resources (mostly money) for multiple people to work on it professionally.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  What I don't understand is, where are all the code and security contributions from Big N and other multi-billion-dollar international scale and users? Do they all have their own internal fork of every major library? If not, you would think that they would be their own financial interest to keep somebody on payroll to maintain fundamental libraries like this.
xorcist 3y ago
Is the argument that well known software should be taken over by professionals? There are many motivated software maintainers, including single guys in Nebraska, who have better operational security than well funded companies. Remember the recent incident with the signing keys at Microsoft? Or the one before that? And these are the biggest, most well funded, companies on Earth we are talking about. Organizations such as Let's Encrypt work well because they are staffed with motivated and competent people, not because they are well funded. This is not a problem that can be solved with funding alone.
kjellsbells 3y ago
I think this is a really important point. Every commercial contract I've been involved in has clauses that are intended to mitigate supplier risk, eg that they go out of business, and the contracts people do due diligence on suppliers to vet that they are who they say, try to eliminate the one-person operations, and generally mitigate risk if they really need the code but the only supplier is a tiny startup. Perhaps large corpos need to apply their standard risk mitigation lens to their supply chain. Their stack or their security depends on these 390 packages. 27 of them have less than 3 maintainers. Recommendation: find alternatives.
mnau 3y ago
> bigger foundations like Apache or Mozilla What bigger foundations? Apache foundation has yearly revenue $2.1 million. Why do you think they reacted as they reacted to log4j? There are no resources. Open source is running on fumes.
- to11mtm 3y ago
  pretty much this. That's why for whatever anyone thinks of Theo's antics, I appreciated the OpenSSL/LibreSSL Valhalla blogs and overall effort to do something about it. TBH I'm amazed in it's current state that Apache took in Pekko(FKA JVM Akka...), part of me is guessing it's because some of their other infra is dependent on it... Foundation based OSS is on fumes. Open core... I am still hopeful for on many levels.

Denvercoder9 3y ago

I agree we need to stop depending on the 20-year hobby project of the guy in Nebraska, but adding barriers (which requiring travel and in-person meetings is) to sharing the load is not the solution. What these projects need is the necessary resources (mostly money) for multiple people to work on it professionally.

nerdponx 3y ago
What I don't understand is, where are all the code and security contributions from Big N and other multi-billion-dollar international scale and users? Do they all have their own internal fork of every major library? If not, you would think that they would be their own financial interest to keep somebody on payroll to maintain fundamental libraries like this.

xorcist 3y ago

Is the argument that well known software should be taken over by professionals? There are many motivated software maintainers, including single guys in Nebraska, who have better operational security than well funded companies. Remember the recent incident with the signing keys at Microsoft? Or the one before that? And these are the biggest, most well funded, companies on Earth we are talking about. Organizations such as Let's Encrypt work well because they are staffed with motivated and competent people, not because they are well funded. This is not a problem that can be solved with funding alone.

kjellsbells 3y ago

I think this is a really important point. Every commercial contract I've been involved in has clauses that are intended to mitigate supplier risk, eg that they go out of business, and the contracts people do due diligence on suppliers to vet that they are who they say, try to eliminate the one-person operations, and generally mitigate risk if they really need the code but the only supplier is a tiny startup. Perhaps large corpos need to apply their standard risk mitigation lens to their supply chain. Their stack or their security depends on these 390 packages. 27 of them have less than 3 maintainers. Recommendation: find alternatives.

mnau 3y ago

> bigger foundations like Apache or Mozilla What bigger foundations? Apache foundation has yearly revenue $2.1 million. Why do you think they reacted as they reacted to log4j? There are no resources. Open source is running on fumes.

to11mtm 3y ago
pretty much this. That's why for whatever anyone thinks of Theo's antics, I appreciated the OpenSSL/LibreSSL Valhalla blogs and overall effort to do something about it. TBH I'm amazed in it's current state that Apache took in Pekko(FKA JVM Akka...), part of me is guessing it's because some of their other infra is dependent on it... Foundation based OSS is on fumes. Open core... I am still hopeful for on many levels.