11 ms·

30+ years maintaining one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure on nearly every Linux and Unix system, and he's currently looking for a sponsor to fund

30+ years maintaining one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure on nearly every Linux and Unix system, and he's currently looking for a sponsor to fund continued development. Every company running sudo in production owes this man. Someone should fix that

boringg 9mo ago
Right? A company to step and cut a check to support this would get positive publicity and there doing something good for community at large. Someone step up.
- lovich 9mo ago
  Companies don’t step up and do things for the common good. They do things for profit. Occasionally that looks like they are charitable if the value of the PR is worth it for them. No one[1] changes what product they are using based on funding or not of open source software. Companies will step in and fund it if they want control, like with Rust, or if the maintainer finally stops giving them free labor and they actually need the software. [1] not enough people to alter finances
oconnore 9mo ago
Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. Sudo is kind of a UX tool for user sessions where the user fundamentally can do things that require admin/root privileges but they don't trust themselves not to fat finger things so we add some friction. That friction is not really a security layer, it's a UX layer against fat fingering. I know there is more to sudo if you really go deep on it, but the above is what 99+% of users are doing with it. If you're using sudo as a sort of framework for building setuid-like tooling, then this does not apply to you.
- acdha 9mo ago
  > A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. … and sudo is a common tool for doing that so you can do things like say members of this group can restart a specific service or trigger a task as a service user without otherwise giving them root. Yes, there are many other ways to accomplish that goal but it seems odd to criticize a tool being used for its original purpose.
  - pphysch 9mo ago
    PSA for anyone reading this, you should probably use polkit instead of sudo if you just want to grant systemd-related permissions, like restarting a service, to an unprivileged user. It's roughly the same complexity (one drop-in file) to implement.
    - acdha 9mo ago
      I’d broaden that slightly to say you should try to have as few mechanisms for elevating privileges as possible: if you had tooling around sudo, dzdo, etc. for PAM, auditing, etc. I wouldn’t lightly add a third tool until you were confident that you had parity on that side.
      - pphysch 9mo ago
        Privilege escalation (superuser capabilities) and RBAC ought to be viewed differently, IMO. There's a place for true superusers, such as auditing, where no stone should be too heavy. But mostly for securing systems, we want RBAC, and sudo is abused as a pile-driver where only a mallet was needed. Polkit is more of a proper policy toolkit.
        acdha 9mo ago
        That’s a valid choice. I’m just saying that you should pick ideally one tool for that class of work. For example, if you support one tool for Mac and Linux users that’s probably worth more than supporting two similar tools even if one of them is better.
- bobmcnamara 9mo ago
  Auditing.
- throw0101a 9mo ago
  > Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. And doing cross-role actions may be part of that production environment. You could configure an ACME client to run as a service account to talk to an ACME server (like Let's Encrypt), write the nonce files in /var/www, and then the resulting new certificate in /etc/certs. But you still need to restart (or at least reload) the web/IMAP/SMTP server to pick up the updated certs. But do you want the ACME client to run as the same service user as the web server? You can add sudo so that the ACME service account can tell the web service account/web server to do a reload.
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    In your example certbot is given permission to write to /var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge and to write certs somewhere. Your web server also has permission to read those files too. There is no need for the acme client and web server to run as the same user. For reloads the certbot user can be given permission to just invoke the reload command / signal directly. There does not need to be sudo in between them.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  Almost everyone is running sudo in production.
- bloqs 9mo ago
  the fact this is a reply to the content in the parent just demos the complete lack of social skills or empathy many in this community are known for
- jcelerier 9mo ago
  bro i just want to apt install gimp :(
brightball 9mo ago
This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility. Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.
- lenerdenator 9mo ago
  I don't think they even see it as their responsibility, more, "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software".
  - JuniperMesos 9mo ago
    If he actually did charge money someone else would've written an implementation of sudo to solve their own needs and avoid the overhead of transacting with a random developer.
    - snvzz 9mo ago
      And then "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software" would apply to that someone.
      - Grimblewald 9mo ago
        And in such a system, before long, we have an ecosystem that resembles the venereal disease masequaraing as an addon store we see in wordpress.
  - _fizz_buzz_ 9mo ago
    "Your 3 months sudo trial is expiring. Would you like to sign up for sudo-pro (best for hobbiest and small teams), sudo-business (up to 100 users) or sudo-enterprise (reach out for a quote)"
    - lenerdenator 9mo ago
      Nightmarish, isn't it? But that's how the higher-ups at places like IBM and Oracle see the world. And these people are free to roam the streets unfettered. Hardly seems right.
shevy-java 9mo ago
I disagree on "the most critical" part. You can be superuser at all times. I understand the arguments why not; I am pointing out that this is possible. Despite people claiming aliens will arrive and nothing will work, everything works fine when the superuser account is used too. Also, I disagree that every company needs to pay the man. Funding is important, yes, but a *nix system is not crippled without sudo. You can change the permission systems. The superuser can do so too. It is not black magic. The permission system is trivial. sudo is simply a feature of convenience, not a "if sudo does not exist, nothing works" - that just makes no sense.
- account42 9mo ago
  You don't even have to be root all the time, su is all you need unless you have a fetish for software bloat.
noosphr 9mo ago
Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this. Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
- groby_b 9mo ago
  That's a nice slogan, but how does it work? Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra? The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder. Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department? What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.
  - conception 9mo ago
    Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
    - mulmen 9mo ago
      What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want? The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
    - groby_b 9mo ago
      And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things. It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
groby_b 9mo ago
You can only fix that with leverage. The sudo maintainer doesn't have it. sudo is valuable, but if Todd stepped away, you could (and would) find other maintainers because it's so important. If you want to fix it, you need organizational heft comparable to the companies using it, and the ability & willingness to make freeriding a more painful experience.
- eichin 9mo ago
  Wasn't the sudo-rs (rust version) already reducing that leverage even further? (and finding interesting bugs, but that's not the point here)
af78 9mo ago
Surprisingly Jia Tan has not offered to help yet.
- SunlitCat 9mo ago
  Maybe someone should suggest, sudo needs compression capabilities and suggest a great developer, being helpful with that one? :D
- midtake 9mo ago
  Jia Tan and his 40 sockpuppets are undoubtedly trying.
tuhgdetzhh 9mo ago
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
gonzo41 9mo ago
At the least, all the hyperscalers should be putting money into a fund for this sort of thing.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
aboardRat4 9mo ago
Why would it be needed to continue the development of sudo? Isn't it done and finished, after 30 years of development?
- not_ai 9mo ago
  The monthly releases seem to indicate otherwise.
  - aboardRat4 9mo ago
    Something's deeply wrong here.
    - mulmen 9mo ago
      Then fork it and finish it. I’m sure it will be a huge success.
      - alt187 9mo ago
        You should look up "doas". It might enlighten you.
        mulmen 9mo ago
        If you have a point to make then make it. I don’t accept anonymous homework assignments.
    - s5fs 9mo ago
      Things have changed quite a bit in the past 30 years! I encourage you to peek at their changelog (https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/ https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/) for more insight into why this project is still under active development.
      - jibal 9mo ago
        I just learned about amathia (https://modernstoicism.com/there-is-nothing-banal-about-philosophy-by-massimo-pigliucci/ https://modernstoicism.com/there-is-nothing-banal-about-phil...), which seems to apply here.
firesteelrain 9mo ago
I guess I don’t understand. Take RHEL. The sudo maintainer seeking a new sponsor affects upstream velocity and stewardship, not the deployed trust model of enterprise distributions. RHEL does not “follow HEAD.” It vendors a known-good snapshot and assumes long-term responsibility for it. Core tools like sudo have survived things like this before
hiAndrewQuinn 9mo ago
I wonder how many guys who have have written or significantly maintained "household name" level FOSS products just earn a corporate sinecure somewhere as hypercompetent remote sysadmins or ICs or something. Folks who don't necessarily care to earn top dollar, with all the headaches that entails, but also almost never have to actually work more than 2 hours in a given day to keep the ship going, and the arrangement is just so cozy and gives them enough time to themselves to work on their actual passion that they accept the arrangement. I know of at least one recruiter who does something like this and specializes in greybeard hiring, and it seems like a steady niche if you have the network to pull it off.
account42 9mo ago
> one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure It's really not.
- Hendrikto 9mo ago
  How is it not? A suid binary installed on pretty much every Unix system ever seems pretty critical to me.
  - mayhemducks 9mo ago
    Living without it isn't hard IMO. It's more of a convenience. Most of the servers I ever login to only have one non-root user anyway. When I need root, I switch to root.
    - rurban 9mo ago
      And how do you switch to root? sudo is the most popular way

boringg 9mo ago

Right? A company to step and cut a check to support this would get positive publicity and there doing something good for community at large. Someone step up.

lovich 9mo ago
Companies don’t step up and do things for the common good. They do things for profit. Occasionally that looks like they are charitable if the value of the PR is worth it for them. No one[1] changes what product they are using based on funding or not of open source software. Companies will step in and fund it if they want control, like with Rust, or if the maintainer finally stops giving them free labor and they actually need the software. [1] not enough people to alter finances

oconnore 9mo ago

Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. Sudo is kind of a UX tool for user sessions where the user fundamentally can do things that require admin/root privileges but they don't trust themselves not to fat finger things so we add some friction. That friction is not really a security layer, it's a UX layer against fat fingering. I know there is more to sudo if you really go deep on it, but the above is what 99+% of users are doing with it. If you're using sudo as a sort of framework for building setuid-like tooling, then this does not apply to you.

acdha 9mo ago
> A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. … and sudo is a common tool for doing that so you can do things like say members of this group can restart a specific service or trigger a task as a service user without otherwise giving them root. Yes, there are many other ways to accomplish that goal but it seems odd to criticize a tool being used for its original purpose.
- pphysch 9mo ago
  PSA for anyone reading this, you should probably use polkit instead of sudo if you just want to grant systemd-related permissions, like restarting a service, to an unprivileged user. It's roughly the same complexity (one drop-in file) to implement.
  - acdha 9mo ago
    I’d broaden that slightly to say you should try to have as few mechanisms for elevating privileges as possible: if you had tooling around sudo, dzdo, etc. for PAM, auditing, etc. I wouldn’t lightly add a third tool until you were confident that you had parity on that side.
    - pphysch 9mo ago
      Privilege escalation (superuser capabilities) and RBAC ought to be viewed differently, IMO. There's a place for true superusers, such as auditing, where no stone should be too heavy. But mostly for securing systems, we want RBAC, and sudo is abused as a pile-driver where only a mallet was needed. Polkit is more of a proper policy toolkit.
      - acdha 9mo ago
        That’s a valid choice. I’m just saying that you should pick ideally one tool for that class of work. For example, if you support one tool for Mac and Linux users that’s probably worth more than supporting two similar tools even if one of them is better.
bobmcnamara 9mo ago
Auditing.
throw0101a 9mo ago
> Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control. And doing cross-role actions may be part of that production environment. You could configure an ACME client to run as a service account to talk to an ACME server (like Let's Encrypt), write the nonce files in /var/www, and then the resulting new certificate in /etc/certs. But you still need to restart (or at least reload) the web/IMAP/SMTP server to pick up the updated certs. But do you want the ACME client to run as the same service user as the web server? You can add sudo so that the ACME service account can tell the web service account/web server to do a reload.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  In your example certbot is given permission to write to /var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge and to write certs somewhere. Your web server also has permission to read those files too. There is no need for the acme client and web server to run as the same user. For reloads the certbot user can be given permission to just invoke the reload command / signal directly. There does not need to be sudo in between them.
bigstrat2003 9mo ago
Almost everyone is running sudo in production.
bloqs 9mo ago
the fact this is a reply to the content in the parent just demos the complete lack of social skills or empathy many in this community are known for
jcelerier 9mo ago
bro i just want to apt install gimp :(

brightball 9mo ago

This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility. Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.

lenerdenator 9mo ago
I don't think they even see it as their responsibility, more, "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software".
- JuniperMesos 9mo ago
  If he actually did charge money someone else would've written an implementation of sudo to solve their own needs and avoid the overhead of transacting with a random developer.
  - snvzz 9mo ago
    And then "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software" would apply to that someone.
    - Grimblewald 9mo ago
      And in such a system, before long, we have an ecosystem that resembles the venereal disease masequaraing as an addon store we see in wordpress.
- _fizz_buzz_ 9mo ago
  "Your 3 months sudo trial is expiring. Would you like to sign up for sudo-pro (best for hobbiest and small teams), sudo-business (up to 100 users) or sudo-enterprise (reach out for a quote)"
  - lenerdenator 9mo ago
    Nightmarish, isn't it? But that's how the higher-ups at places like IBM and Oracle see the world. And these people are free to roam the streets unfettered. Hardly seems right.

shevy-java 9mo ago

I disagree on "the most critical" part. You can be superuser at all times. I understand the arguments why not; I am pointing out that this is possible. Despite people claiming aliens will arrive and nothing will work, everything works fine when the superuser account is used too. Also, I disagree that every company needs to pay the man. Funding is important, yes, but a *nix system is not crippled without sudo. You can change the permission systems. The superuser can do so too. It is not black magic. The permission system is trivial. sudo is simply a feature of convenience, not a "if sudo does not exist, nothing works" - that just makes no sense.

account42 9mo ago
You don't even have to be root all the time, su is all you need unless you have a fetish for software bloat.

noosphr 9mo ago

Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this. Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.

groby_b 9mo ago
That's a nice slogan, but how does it work? Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra? The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder. Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department? What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.
- conception 9mo ago
  Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
  - mulmen 9mo ago
    What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want? The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
  - groby_b 9mo ago
    And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things. It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.

groby_b 9mo ago

You can only fix that with leverage. The sudo maintainer doesn't have it. sudo is valuable, but if Todd stepped away, you could (and would) find other maintainers because it's so important. If you want to fix it, you need organizational heft comparable to the companies using it, and the ability & willingness to make freeriding a more painful experience.

eichin 9mo ago
Wasn't the sudo-rs (rust version) already reducing that leverage even further? (and finding interesting bugs, but that's not the point here)

af78 9mo ago

Surprisingly Jia Tan has not offered to help yet.

SunlitCat 9mo ago
Maybe someone should suggest, sudo needs compression capabilities and suggest a great developer, being helpful with that one? :D
midtake 9mo ago
Jia Tan and his 40 sockpuppets are undoubtedly trying.

tuhgdetzhh 9mo ago

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

gonzo41 9mo ago

At the least, all the hyperscalers should be putting money into a fund for this sort of thing.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

aboardRat4 9mo ago

Why would it be needed to continue the development of sudo? Isn't it done and finished, after 30 years of development?

not_ai 9mo ago
The monthly releases seem to indicate otherwise.
- aboardRat4 9mo ago
  Something's deeply wrong here.
  - mulmen 9mo ago
    Then fork it and finish it. I’m sure it will be a huge success.
    - alt187 9mo ago
      You should look up "doas". It might enlighten you.
      - mulmen 9mo ago
        If you have a point to make then make it. I don’t accept anonymous homework assignments.
  - s5fs 9mo ago
    Things have changed quite a bit in the past 30 years! I encourage you to peek at their changelog (https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/ https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/) for more insight into why this project is still under active development.
    - jibal 9mo ago
      I just learned about amathia (https://modernstoicism.com/there-is-nothing-banal-about-philosophy-by-massimo-pigliucci/ https://modernstoicism.com/there-is-nothing-banal-about-phil...), which seems to apply here.

firesteelrain 9mo ago

I guess I don’t understand. Take RHEL. The sudo maintainer seeking a new sponsor affects upstream velocity and stewardship, not the deployed trust model of enterprise distributions. RHEL does not “follow HEAD.” It vendors a known-good snapshot and assumes long-term responsibility for it. Core tools like sudo have survived things like this before

hiAndrewQuinn 9mo ago

I wonder how many guys who have have written or significantly maintained "household name" level FOSS products just earn a corporate sinecure somewhere as hypercompetent remote sysadmins or ICs or something. Folks who don't necessarily care to earn top dollar, with all the headaches that entails, but also almost never have to actually work more than 2 hours in a given day to keep the ship going, and the arrangement is just so cozy and gives them enough time to themselves to work on their actual passion that they accept the arrangement. I know of at least one recruiter who does something like this and specializes in greybeard hiring, and it seems like a steady niche if you have the network to pull it off.

account42 9mo ago

> one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure It's really not.

Hendrikto 9mo ago
How is it not? A suid binary installed on pretty much every Unix system ever seems pretty critical to me.
- mayhemducks 9mo ago
  Living without it isn't hard IMO. It's more of a convenience. Most of the servers I ever login to only have one non-root user anyway. When I need root, I switch to root.
  - rurban 9mo ago
    And how do you switch to root? sudo is the most popular way