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This is why Big Tech is so desperate for AI to work as a wholesale replacement for software developers: they do not pay for their Open Source consumption as-is,

This is why Big Tech is so desperate for AI to work as a wholesale replacement for software developers: they do not pay for their Open Source consumption as-is, and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do. The fact that sudo is a critical security pillar for trillions of dollars of global infrastructure but this guy gets bupkis for it screams volumes about the current state of technology. We must do better, or it’ll be closed systems (OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle) all the way down as maintainers age out, go bankrupt, or die without succession plans in place.

palmotea 9mo ago
Honestly, it seems like the idealism of open source shouldn't have survived its contact with capitalism, but I suppose the contact wasn't painful enough the the exploitation continued for a long time. Maybe we need a license that's even more onerous to corporations than the AGPL, like something with a revenue share clause. Or maybe the problem is the naivete of software engineers. In aggregate, there was so much embrace of libertarianism that no groundwork was laid to protect ourselves from things like AI and offshoring.
- stego-tech 9mo ago
  Been pitching that with my FOSS colleagues and peers for years, now. A license for individual and educational use, but pay-to-play for anyone tangentially making revenue from its use. Then the conversation boils down to the business engineering of how much should something cost, with some arguing for flat yearly rates, and others arguing for cost-per-unit, while others still fret about "disrupting" the status quo immediately after acknowledging its untenability. It's...frustrating, but those who do the work are the most qualified to explain what they need. For the rest of us, it's encouraging them to seek reasonable compensation for their work from those who exploit it for profit, and that doing so doesn't necessarily go against the spirit of open source.
  - calvinmorrison 9mo ago
    can't wait for popularity-contest(1) to be mandatory and required a linked credit card.
- acuozzo 9mo ago
  > the idealism of open source shouldn't have survived its contact with capitalism The US economy of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s made it possible.
- softfalcon 9mo ago
  I don't mean to come across as far too cynical, but in what world has a software license ever stopped the greedy and powerful from pillaging the IP of other people smaller and weaker than them? In my opinion, libertarianism in software is a hollow dream that leads people to make foolish decisions that can't be protected. This makes it easy for corporations to exploit and quash any barely audible opposition. Almost as if by plan, the libertarian mindset has eroded and weakened open source protections, defanging and declawing it every step of the way.
htx80nerd 9mo ago
>"it screams volumes about the current state of technology." about the current state of Big Corp vampires who are happy to bleed everyone dry to put more $$ in their own very fat pockets
- softfalcon 9mo ago
  Exactly
- functionmouse 9mo ago
  Our economic system starves you to death if you don't People aren't vampires because they're on top, they're on top because they're vampires. Shit flows downstream
  - whatis991 9mo ago
    A change in economic system might be neither sufficient nor necessary, especially if the new economic system turns out to be even worse, or a scam. One approach is to have expectations to not only the economic system, but also other systems, and the different people involved, no matter if they're on the top, on the bottom, or somewhere in the middle.
softfalcon 9mo ago
Sounds like the system is working as intended... Not trying to be glib here. This feels like the embrace, extend, extinguish pattern that we jokingly used to think was only Microsoft. It is now becoming more and more obviously the modus operandi of the entire enterprise software ecosystem. I believe you are correct to be frustrated and ringing the alarm bell. This is a "death of the commons" moment for OSS.
drnick1 9mo ago
> and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do. What about the Rust rewrite (sudo-rs)? I think it shows people are interested in maintaining and/or modernizing tools taken for granted.
- whatis991 9mo ago
  It has a more lax license AFAIK. Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes. Edit: To specify, new projects like sudo-rs may seem promising, but going by observation and experience with similar projects, there is no guarantee that sudo-rs and similar projects will be successful, good and continued to be maintained. The problems with old projects can end up applying to new projects as well. And projects in Rust are no exception, going by experience with existing, older Rust projects. Aside, a pet peeve I have is that for instance Ruffle has not turned out as successful as I had hoped for, even after several years and many sponsors. The proprietary Flash runtimes written in C still outperform Ruffle greatly in some cases, causing problems for some users that want to use Ruffle instead of other runtimes.
  - aw1621107 9mo ago
    > Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes. This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur; the state of non-sudo-rs projects/libraries says nothing about the state of sudo-rs itself. Not to mention that I'd imagine a similar statement would probably be true for projects and libraries written in any reasonably popular language.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      If there are 1000 projects that aren't sudo-rs but are similarly load bearing, and they have all been abandoned/in so-so shape, you're right that it doesn't actually say anything about sudo-rs, but there's a highly probable outcome that will be inferred by most people. Incorrectly or otherwise.
  - 9mo ago
whatis991 9mo ago
This might be a controversial view: What if the exploitative aspect is open source itself? Trick some above average but naive developers into giving their talent, effort, insights and time away for free or very little? Maybe open source or something similar could have been organized in a way that wasn't exploitative and wasn't (possibly) unsustainable, but that is not how things ended up with what Richard Stallman and others organized.
- markus_zhang 9mo ago
  I think at least the license should say something like we will charge on a per CPU or whatever basis for commercial usage. You give it away for free so don’t be surprised to get abused. Human nature working at its best and worst here.
- monero-xmr 9mo ago
  The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something. Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free. There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with. But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
  - whatis991 9mo ago
    I think you have good arguments, but I wonder if there are alternatives that could work in at least some cases. Like, how Unreal engine's license works. Source-available to game developers, but in theory limited to paying customers, or something along those lines.
SoftTalker 9mo ago
Why should something like sudo not be "done" after 30 years? Sudo is one of the poster children for creeping featuritis, to the point that the sudoers man page is a meme ("Don't despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF ...") Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).
- asveikau 9mo ago
  This community and others like it are so weird in that if they see something as stable as sudo but without recent commits, rather than conclude that it's solid and doesn't need further changes, they see it as some kind of a problem and want to switch to something that's seen major changes in the last week. Maybe that's somehow related to why so many companies are shoving AI into a bunch of stuff that doesn't need it. Gotta keep everything on the hype train. Working and fulfilling people's needs is no longer good enough.
  - catdog 9mo ago
    The thing is, there is next to no software that "doesn't need further changes" at all. There is always something, sure it might be infrequent and/or most of the time nothing really big or difficult (except sometimes) but the point is: someone needs to step up and do it. If a see a project with recent activity, best from multiple people it is a strong signal that this will happen, if the last commit is a year ago I must assume it's completely abandoned because most of the time it just is. Sometimes it's clearly communicated that it is the way because the authors see it as essentially feature complete, there are some examples of this but not that many honestly.
- blame-troi 9mo ago
  Different platform but the simplest mainframe utility IEFBR14, a noop process to trigger JCL events started as one instruction. Then two. Then debate started about which machine instruction should be used to set the return code to zero …
  - pjsg 9mo ago
arccy 9mo ago
maintainers need to learn to say "no" to scope creep and entitled users. sudo should have been a near complete tool after it was written.
- sllabres 9mo ago
  So no #includedir, no LDAP integration, no log_input/output, no PAM integration ...?
pwndByDeath 9mo ago
I've always favored the view that digital goods are only scarce until they are released. if we had a market for patch releases once they hit some goal. Uses could tip to reach the goal. After the goal is reached the patch is released and to all. Still have free loaders but one might live on the work
- WorkerBee28474 9mo ago
  So...crowdfunding via a platform like Kickstarter?

palmotea 9mo ago

Honestly, it seems like the idealism of open source shouldn't have survived its contact with capitalism, but I suppose the contact wasn't painful enough the the exploitation continued for a long time. Maybe we need a license that's even more onerous to corporations than the AGPL, like something with a revenue share clause. Or maybe the problem is the naivete of software engineers. In aggregate, there was so much embrace of libertarianism that no groundwork was laid to protect ourselves from things like AI and offshoring.

stego-tech 9mo ago
Been pitching that with my FOSS colleagues and peers for years, now. A license for individual and educational use, but pay-to-play for anyone tangentially making revenue from its use. Then the conversation boils down to the business engineering of how much should something cost, with some arguing for flat yearly rates, and others arguing for cost-per-unit, while others still fret about "disrupting" the status quo immediately after acknowledging its untenability. It's...frustrating, but those who do the work are the most qualified to explain what they need. For the rest of us, it's encouraging them to seek reasonable compensation for their work from those who exploit it for profit, and that doing so doesn't necessarily go against the spirit of open source.
- calvinmorrison 9mo ago
  can't wait for popularity-contest(1) to be mandatory and required a linked credit card.
acuozzo 9mo ago
> the idealism of open source shouldn't have survived its contact with capitalism The US economy of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s made it possible.
softfalcon 9mo ago
I don't mean to come across as far too cynical, but in what world has a software license ever stopped the greedy and powerful from pillaging the IP of other people smaller and weaker than them? In my opinion, libertarianism in software is a hollow dream that leads people to make foolish decisions that can't be protected. This makes it easy for corporations to exploit and quash any barely audible opposition. Almost as if by plan, the libertarian mindset has eroded and weakened open source protections, defanging and declawing it every step of the way.

htx80nerd 9mo ago

>"it screams volumes about the current state of technology." about the current state of Big Corp vampires who are happy to bleed everyone dry to put more $$ in their own very fat pockets

softfalcon 9mo ago
Exactly
functionmouse 9mo ago
Our economic system starves you to death if you don't People aren't vampires because they're on top, they're on top because they're vampires. Shit flows downstream
- whatis991 9mo ago
  A change in economic system might be neither sufficient nor necessary, especially if the new economic system turns out to be even worse, or a scam. One approach is to have expectations to not only the economic system, but also other systems, and the different people involved, no matter if they're on the top, on the bottom, or somewhere in the middle.

softfalcon 9mo ago

Sounds like the system is working as intended... Not trying to be glib here. This feels like the embrace, extend, extinguish pattern that we jokingly used to think was only Microsoft. It is now becoming more and more obviously the modus operandi of the entire enterprise software ecosystem. I believe you are correct to be frustrated and ringing the alarm bell. This is a "death of the commons" moment for OSS.

drnick1 9mo ago

> and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do. What about the Rust rewrite (sudo-rs)? I think it shows people are interested in maintaining and/or modernizing tools taken for granted.

whatis991 9mo ago
It has a more lax license AFAIK. Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes. Edit: To specify, new projects like sudo-rs may seem promising, but going by observation and experience with similar projects, there is no guarantee that sudo-rs and similar projects will be successful, good and continued to be maintained. The problems with old projects can end up applying to new projects as well. And projects in Rust are no exception, going by experience with existing, older Rust projects. Aside, a pet peeve I have is that for instance Ruffle has not turned out as successful as I had hoped for, even after several years and many sponsors. The proprietary Flash runtimes written in C still outperform Ruffle greatly in some cases, causing problems for some users that want to use Ruffle instead of other runtimes.
- aw1621107 9mo ago
  > Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes. This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur; the state of non-sudo-rs projects/libraries says nothing about the state of sudo-rs itself. Not to mention that I'd imagine a similar statement would probably be true for projects and libraries written in any reasonably popular language.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    If there are 1000 projects that aren't sudo-rs but are similarly load bearing, and they have all been abandoned/in so-so shape, you're right that it doesn't actually say anything about sudo-rs, but there's a highly probable outcome that will be inferred by most people. Incorrectly or otherwise.
- 9mo ago

whatis991 9mo ago

This might be a controversial view: What if the exploitative aspect is open source itself? Trick some above average but naive developers into giving their talent, effort, insights and time away for free or very little? Maybe open source or something similar could have been organized in a way that wasn't exploitative and wasn't (possibly) unsustainable, but that is not how things ended up with what Richard Stallman and others organized.

markus_zhang 9mo ago
I think at least the license should say something like we will charge on a per CPU or whatever basis for commercial usage. You give it away for free so don’t be surprised to get abused. Human nature working at its best and worst here.
monero-xmr 9mo ago
The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something. Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free. There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with. But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
- whatis991 9mo ago
  I think you have good arguments, but I wonder if there are alternatives that could work in at least some cases. Like, how Unreal engine's license works. Source-available to game developers, but in theory limited to paying customers, or something along those lines.

SoftTalker 9mo ago

Why should something like sudo not be "done" after 30 years? Sudo is one of the poster children for creeping featuritis, to the point that the sudoers man page is a meme ("Don't despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF ...") Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).

asveikau 9mo ago
This community and others like it are so weird in that if they see something as stable as sudo but without recent commits, rather than conclude that it's solid and doesn't need further changes, they see it as some kind of a problem and want to switch to something that's seen major changes in the last week. Maybe that's somehow related to why so many companies are shoving AI into a bunch of stuff that doesn't need it. Gotta keep everything on the hype train. Working and fulfilling people's needs is no longer good enough.
- catdog 9mo ago
  The thing is, there is next to no software that "doesn't need further changes" at all. There is always something, sure it might be infrequent and/or most of the time nothing really big or difficult (except sometimes) but the point is: someone needs to step up and do it. If a see a project with recent activity, best from multiple people it is a strong signal that this will happen, if the last commit is a year ago I must assume it's completely abandoned because most of the time it just is. Sometimes it's clearly communicated that it is the way because the authors see it as essentially feature complete, there are some examples of this but not that many honestly.
blame-troi 9mo ago
Different platform but the simplest mainframe utility IEFBR14, a noop process to trigger JCL events started as one instruction. Then two. Then debate started about which machine instruction should be used to set the return code to zero …
- pjsg 9mo ago

arccy 9mo ago

maintainers need to learn to say "no" to scope creep and entitled users. sudo should have been a near complete tool after it was written.

sllabres 9mo ago
So no #includedir, no LDAP integration, no log_input/output, no PAM integration ...?

pwndByDeath 9mo ago

I've always favored the view that digital goods are only scarce until they are released. if we had a market for patch releases once they hit some goal. Uses could tip to reach the goal. After the goal is reached the patch is released and to all. Still have free loaders but one might live on the work

WorkerBee28474 9mo ago
So...crowdfunding via a platform like Kickstarter?