9 ms·

We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

• dmitrygr 4mo ago
  > Additionally, when a critical package has no one maintaining it, Akrites will stand as the maintainer of last resort so a fix can still reach everyone in a timely fashion. Ambitious and interesting. I wonder how long this will last and on whose dime and time? Akrites employs no engineers, so who will make the fixes and who'll pay them?
  • npodbielski 4mo ago
    Who they employ then? AI?
    • NSUserDefaults 4mo ago
      > Today, the undersigned commit real resources — engineering talent, security expertise, and funding — to harden the software we share
      • fmbb 4mo ago
        Human talent or LLM talent?
  • wwind123 4mo ago
    Yeah, very commendable. Now I just wish the closed-source software that have lost support could similarly be supported this way, with the help from AI, so we don't have to throw away that many hardwares when their software can no longer be updated.
  • sinpif 4mo ago
    I'd be interested in 1) what makes a package "critical" 2) how do you take ownership if the original author is unreachable or not cooperating? Are you going to fork it and somehow make everyone switch to your fork, even on older LTS systems?
• charcircuit 4mo ago
  Why only a focus on Open Source? I feel like vulnerabilities in closed source products like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, and Google Chrome to name a few can be just as essentially and foundational as other open source software for many businesses.
  • dofm 4mo ago
    I think the idea is that automated source code processing is making it possible to find vulnerabilities at great speed and in an overwhelming way in software that does not have paid maintainers, whereas closed source software in active use has both less accessible code and paid maintainers. A charitable foundation might be plausible to help companies secure their closed for-profit software but it doesn’t really have the same urgency for the fabric of the internet (or the same moral clarity)
    • charcircuit 4mo ago
      >both less accessible code Yet still important to be secured due to the impact vulnerabilities can have. And LLMs can work without source code access via utilizing things like debug symbols, disassembly, reverse engineering, etc. >paid maintainers Just like open source maintainers their time is already being spent on other things which they see as more important over making the project 100% security bug free. Just because they are being paid, that doesn't make security their number 1 priority.
      • behindsight 4mo ago
        Project Glasswing is already a thing, and the other labs have started their own initiatives too if they want to collaborate and work on securing closed-source software. Still not addressed the moral clarity point being brought up, nor the ramifications of the Linux Foundation choosing which closed source projects to focus on and alienating their mission statement. Again, your idea is noble but why should the Linux Foundation be saddled with it when those other options exist? OSS needs their focus as their mission outlines.
      • dofm 4mo ago
• rjzzleep 4mo ago
  I'm extremely concerned about the state of Open Source. The gamification of the whole thing & devstats means that people that are good at gaming metrics are rising up the ranks and people that are genuine high quality contributors and pushed to the sidelines unless they have a very popular profile. Mass generated AI slop and AI content gives people massive devstats boosts.
• einpoklum 4mo ago
  > We are joined by Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler Many of the names on the list makes the initiative rather suspect. Companies who do a lot to undermine free and open-source software, who hide critical software behind their walls, preventing both its scrutiny and its adaptation and improvement, and two of the LLM giants - they'll "defend open source"? I don't know about that. > Akrites gives critical infrastructure stakeholders a confidential, structured place to coordinate vulnerability discovery, remediation, and disclosure across the open source projects they depend on So, a bunch of large corporations - some of who are known to be in bed with the US government - will share vulnerabilities among themselves, out of the public eye? Fishy.
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  • throwaway72587 4mo ago
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  • Fordec 4mo ago
    Yeah, a bunch of the worst free riders and malicious consumers all in one place. All they're really missing is Oracle and Bambu Lab.
  • nwellnhof 4mo ago
    > All members must be current Linux Foundation members and sign the participation agreement and NDA. Just another opaque and exclusive subproject of the Linux Foundation.
  • hobofan 4mo ago
    That's just your typical list that makes up the Linux foundation. It might not be the idealistic flavour of open source you prefer, but it's the flavour of open source that's actively in use in most tech companies, and that also forms the makeup of most corporate open source participation (e.g. also the top corporate Linux contributors).
• Brian_K_White 4mo ago
  Anything they "maintainer of last resort" would actually be forks, or collectively a distribution. We already have hundreds of distributions acting as maintainer of last resort many times over, only with actual developers and not presuming to make themselves the new upstream for anyone else.
  • sakjur 4mo ago
    Microsoft controls NPM and GitHub. I would not put it past them to truly take over a project if they gauged it in their best interest (though it would be a massive violation of trust, so I'd imagine they'd tread carefully before going there). If it's sent to Akrites, they can even pretend it's done responsibly – even though only megacorps get a seat around that table.
    • trashb 4mo ago
      Well, they did invent EEE after all. Why would they thread carefully? They own the product/service they can shut it down, no need for explanations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    • RobotToaster 4mo ago
      We already saw Automattic (the owners of wordpress) do exactly that in their plugin repository for purely commercial reasons.
• pedromlsreis 4mo ago
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• pedromlsreis 4mo ago
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• witx 4mo ago
  Unforteuately I think it's moot to post this on hacker news. The majority of people here drink deep from the AI pool and just don't care. Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source
  • fithisux 4mo ago
    All voices have a place.
    • cryo32 4mo ago
      Some should be at the bottom of a well.
    • witx 4mo ago
      Ok, and? Where did I say otherwise?
      • fithisux 4mo ago
        I just asserted you statement. I did not attack you.
        • witx 4mo ago
          Sorry
  • shevy-java 4mo ago
    I don't drink the AI slop and I also don't see where you derive to this conclusion. Most of the comments are very much against the AI slop. > Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source On this I agree. This seems indeed just promo advertising to white-wash these companies. They don't really care about ethics in open source.
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• opentestudox 4mo ago
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• cryo32 4mo ago
  No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.
  • fithisux 4mo ago
    Spot on!!!
  • eastbound 4mo ago
    Commercial entities are 95% of useful open-source (Linux, Postgres and similar — excluding leftstr-type of utilities).
    • tetris11 4mo ago
      Commercial entities latch onto useful open-source because it is a successful product they simply cannot compete with.
      • jackdoe 4mo ago
        why would they compete with it when its open?
        • dspillett 4mo ago
          They wouldn't. But the GPP seemed to be implying that we should be grateful to commercial entities for the existence of those useful open projects, when in fact if the commercial entities had their preferred way the projects would not be (as) open.
        • rectang 4mo ago
          To secure network effects for themselves. This is one of the reasons the ASF was founded. https://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html https://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html > We realize that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a market - in the software industry, that means to control tightly a particular conduit such that all others must pay for its use. This is typically done by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus, "ownership" of the protocols must be prevented.
• throw_a_grenade 4mo ago
  Will they hire the actual maintainers of the software in question, to have time dedicated to the project, or will they as usual, dump AI-generated patches unto maintainers, but this time with even more time pressure to merge, lest them consider projects “unmaintained” if they don't push a fix in 3 femtoseconds, and use it as a rationale to take over the project?
  • LaSombra 4mo ago
    I'm pretty sure it'll be an AI dump fest with barely any humans except the long term maintainers having to cope with it all.
    • throw_a_grenade 4mo ago
      I mean, it won't be neither the first nor the last slopdump, but it's the first that's backed by a threat of project takeover. “Maintainers of last resort”, my [back].
• benj111 4mo ago
  I'm not really a Stallman fanboy but I do find the Free software / Open source distinction really stick out in situations like this. There isn't a call out for contributors. This is all done behind closed doors. It's the antithesis of free/open source software, presented as defending it. I don't particularly have any better ideas. And I'm not particularly criticising. It's just a lot of the time the terms are synonymous, but here they starkly different.
• fithisux 4mo ago
  Corporates terrorized people with the financial crisis they created and the unemployment weapon. They terrorized them to abandon their free time. They terrorized them to find easy solutions in the workplace instead of coming up with solutions that require technical expertise and deep thinking. They terrorized people to not conform to standards, or create standards but instead patch around lack of standardization. They terrorized people to not question, but accept. To become slaves. They did not help them get wide knowledge but be specific on the work, like mass produced meat. They swept all problems under the carpet and said "This time it will be different". No victories, just silence on the defeats. It has been happening in the past, has accelerated and made worse as they seized more power. The leap to AI era is the latest and more violent step of this attack on fundamental human rights. The problem is political in my opinion. People ought to demand a better life and more free time to work on open source or do their hobbies. They ought to demand human centric laws that stop the greed and by enforcing the laws at last. Free time is not for consumption, but for production of higher intellectual artefacts.
  • eastbound 4mo ago
    The French famously got the Congés Payés (paid holidays) in 1936 after the big strike. You have great pictures of entire trains of Parisians going to the beach in Deauville by droves. Meanwhile the Germans were working overnight to manufacture bombs. That, alone, is already a sufficient explanation on why we got invaded and lost our country to one of the evilest powers of Earth. France had to be rescued by the Russian, the English and the Americans after losing millions of inhabitants. Because we literally took too much holidays. The one who works the most reaps the entire benefits. And it’s clearly not good to ask for less work all the time. Today France is peanuts on the international market, we are second at everything. Who heard of DailyMotion, which was once as big as Youtube, or Mistral, which was supposed to be our OpenAI?
• bingemaker 4mo ago
  > We are joined by Amazon Web Services ... There goes all the credibility of this post
  • draw_down 4mo ago
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• doublerabbit 4mo ago
  All those open statements are just business wank. > Amazon Web Services We really don't give a shit, We will continue to not give a shit. We might give you a credit if threatened by the EU but really? We don't give a shit. Keep sending us that sweet dosh for AWS. > Anthropic We underpin the front page of the internet with Ai and in so we allow it to train upon the collective with no recognition. It's great to take and not give back. By the way your vibe coded app is looking ownage. > Cisco We are Cisco and we'll license you if we could. We invented the subscription model to charge you per Ethernet port on your router. Opensource is great, we don't even have to contribute upstream. We did once upon a time, isn't that enough? > Citi In partnership with Linux Foundation, we will do nothing and keep doing nothing. Linus enjoys his dosh and handjob now and then. > CNCF Working on the right fixes before the window closes, we prefer that to be left to the developers and we are very proud to support that effort. Unfortunately, no treats for the developers is written in to our company policy. How does pizza sound? > RedHat Open source is the foundation of modern software innovation so we hide answers behind a paywall. We sold ourselves to IBM so we could keep lubing that stripper pole to fill our filthy pockets. Larry Ellison will be here soon for his next lap-dance. > Microsoft & GitHub We decided to throw legal action at a security analyst for finding exploits in our OS for laughs. Open source all the way, we don't even allow you to search on GitHub without a rate limit; it's healthy to laugh. How's your mother doing? She seems a keen user of Windows 11 and as she is very important to us, we've removed that feature she uses most.
• luipugs 4mo ago
  Interestingly no Apple. *edit: Or any non-American companies for that matter .
  • yeahforsureman 4mo ago
    Ericsson is Swedish, though.
• smartmic 4mo ago
  The most important information is this: > participants will contribute engineering resources If it works out as planned, we will see. Apart from this, I am not overwhelmed by the claim of this project. It favors centralization and corporate circles, exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons.
  • shevy-java 4mo ago
    You can even shorten that. This is some corporate hollo-bollers takes-your-time-and-gives-nothing-in-return fakery-roo. > exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons. Yup. Seems kind of like those zombie plants in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (the first remake; though the original is also great, but it was more about communism as threat, whereas the first remake added a bit of alien horror motifes).
    • habinero 4mo ago
      Silicon Valley is not as large as it might seem, and knowledge sharing and consortiums and working groups happen a lot. You can complain about supply chain problems, or you can actually try to work on it. They're trying to work on it.
  • Yokohiii 4mo ago
    Doesn't seem very inclusive. Seems to be another layer to centralize the inbound vulns, gather intelligence and handle them in secret. It may also turn into another source of pressure. Maybe they manage to sort out the real vulns, but then they come in as high priority to the maintainers. Many maintainers are already exhausted from their normal work, sans AI noise. Even if they supply fixes, it still requires review. In best case they could reduce noise but the work is still there. The industry needs to generally fund OS projects to give them the agency to handle it on their own. That's is likely best for quality. If there is still need to filter AI noise then they can add that, but not as a secret opaque thing that controls it all.
• shevy-java 4mo ago
  So this corporate project wants to spam down more repositores via AI slop. No, I don't like it. And no, I am not feeling encouraged to "defend it together" at the slightest, even more so as many of these companies don't really contribute anything at all back.
• tpoacher 4mo ago
  Nice name, "Akrites". Probably not as impressive to a non-Greek, but to a Greek person it creates very strong imagery.
  • oersted 4mo ago
    To save others a search: > The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia) Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border". EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot just copy-paste contemporary disputes and prejudices a thousand years ago. In the historical context it’s just like most borders between different civilizations. The point is that they were a collective organization getting together to defend their land.
    • throwaw12 4mo ago
      > facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. if true, then choosing this name was a very bad decision. Imagine how Muslims would feel, demonizing them even more, before they were terrorists, now they are attacking open source and hence some organizations need akrites to defend from them. I really wish such organizations which try to demonize anyone, to fail miserably
      • adamo 4mo ago
        To be fair, the Akritai was the Byzantine Empire's effort to use the local population to defend the land, instead of having to deploy regular Army or mercenaries. It happened to be Muslim states that was the border. It bears no anti-muslim connotations as a word in Greek. In fact the epic of Digenes Akritas, speaks of Basil, an Akritas of a Greek mother and an Arab father (hence the name Digenes, of two descents). But still, the name is a bad, uninformed choice.
      • asfodelsu 4mo ago
        Α better translation is "defender of the borders" or "Knights of the borders". Form "Akri" = edge, border. It's not Muslim related even at the time they exists.
• highway900 4mo ago
  This is fear that humans will stop software development. Think about it, the backbone of modern enterprise is open source. What if maintainers just stopped, the free ride big tech has had would be left with the slop the maintainers have to deal with now. Which without checks and balances would introduce vulnerabilities.
  • lp4v4n 4mo ago
    I was going to comment exactly this. I think they are predicting that free-software projects are in freefall and no longer attract good people. I recall reading a Linus Torvalds interview in which he said that Git's killer feature was its current maintainer. It sounds like a realization that you can only leech off the host so much, and once your host is dead, there is nobody else to leech from.
• rurban 4mo ago
  So they spend tokens to fix their backbones. Only fair. even required for GPL.
• javascripthater 4mo ago
  yeah open source is cool and all but can we talk about how literally everything is written in javascript now. even your toaster probably runs on node. its an infection.
• jdw64 4mo ago
  After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are. My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share. Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source comes with the barrier of English. And once you get past the English barrier, you hit the cultural barrier. My hobby projects do integrate with open source, but all the technology that actually makes me money depends entirely on the Microsoft ecosystem. Most of the Asian developers around me are also tied to specific vendors. On the other hand, the Korean companies that do have a culture of contributing to open source are large corporations, and entry is determined by academic pedigree. Because the entire context of open source is in English, and learning English reliably is expensive in itself. So to properly work as a developer in Korea, you actually need to be vendor dependent. The corporate ecosystem is not oppression; it is the only viable path to education and survival. If you want to grasp the latest trends, you ultimately need curation from a specific company. Some people say Hangul is a great writing system, but to me, this is where it becomes a curse and a shackle. So when I read Hacker News, I feel just how large the gap in thinking is between the West and the East. The Japanese developers I have talked to mostly talk about coding within corporate environments rather than open source, and Chinese developers are also shaped by their corporate environments. But the posts on HN talk about their 'gardens' being ruined and absorbed by corporations, and they resist that. But since I was raised in a corporate environment from the start, I cannot imagine a different one, so this resistance tends to feel like an aristocratic hobby to me. On the flip side, HN might see corporations as predators. Technology should be a commons, and developers should be free, not tenant farmers of a platform. But the irony I personally feel is that to protect this 'garden commons,' they end up creating centralized, non-public coordination mechanisms with the very corporations that plunder the commons. That feels contradictory to me. For security vulnerability response, non-public coordination may be necessary. If a vulnerability is disclosed before a patch is ready, attackers can create exploits. But the principle of open source is transparency and open discussion, while the Akrites-style security principle is non-public coordination and a single point of contact. On top of that, corporations used open source as free infrastructure, and now that the risk has grown, they are building corporate-led governance systems based on that risk. That feels ambiguous to me. Of course, open source sponsorship has always had some tension, but if that was buying a craftsman's work, this looks more like buying the craftsman's workshop. I wonder how Westerners would read this. I am curious. To me, this looks like a political struggle to take control of governance over the commons. Do Westerners see it as the Avengers? The difference in mindset is sometimes painful.
• bitlad 4mo ago
  You can start by paying maintainers really really well.
• ninjagoo 4mo ago
  > We are joined by Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler A lot of open source folks are going to be very skeptical, rightly so, of this group of players. > ... to find, fix, and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software ... How this is implemented is going to be key. Are they going to contribute through (a) existing channels, pull requests etc. or (b) are they going to fork the projects under the guise of 'security' or (c) offer bug bounties or (d) contribute financially? Approach (a) brings the community along. (b) alienates the community, splits resources, and in the long term will likely cause many open-source projects to die. (c) has potential but timing and speed can be unfavorable for critical bugs, and doesn't mesh with 'responsible disclosure'. (d) can be ineffective for critical bugs unless paired with support for maintainers, which can be incredibly helpful for the opensource ecosystem.
  • amouat 4mo ago
    My best understanding from reading this is a) where possible and b) where necessary. This is the Linux Foundation, so it must put OSS and community first, surely. People talk about contributing financially, but how and to what end? Most projects aren't set up to accept or utilise donations. That said, I would say we should be providing all OSS projects with significant access to AI in order to review their codebases and PRs and hopefully relieve some of the maintenance burden. I know there are some initiatives in this area already.
    • unsungNovelty 4mo ago
      > This is the Linux Foundation, so it must put OSS and community first, surely. Linux Foundation is run by the said called corporates from the list. So is Rust Foundation. Linux in itself is safe cos Linus controls it. Not the rest of the projects LF controls.
      • limagnolia 4mo ago
        So far, the Linux Foundation, from what I have seen, has pretty darn good track record of keeping the projects under its umbrella open source, even going against corporate sponsors to do so. For a recent example, see the recent NATS tuffle. (And I should.recognize that Synadia, finally, did the right thing and backed down).
• fhub 4mo ago
  If members of Google Project Zero team are involved then I have hope. If they are not then I have many doubts.
• zx8080 4mo ago
  This reads as centralization and control effort. It will only provide the power to control opensource to whoever Akrites is (with the major bigtech including Google). Thank you very much, but I remember what Google is doing with Android this September (closing third party installs using .apk).
  • passive 4mo ago
    This is my concern as well. If critical open source packages become dependent on these corporations for "secure" releases, does that enable them to force ID verification into packages, for example? Related, but most of the smart folk I know think Open Source AI means Anthropic and OpenAI are financially impossible. A lot of the companies signed onto this are heavily, heavily leveraged by those two, and have significant incentive to disrupt Open Source AI before all their customers get sticker shock. I've been waiting to see what their move would be, and this might be part of it.
    • LtWorf 4mo ago
      USA is making deals with EU companies forcing them to guarantee no open source software included in their products comes from china or russia. Which makes me think that despite what the folks from pypi keep saying, identifying everyone on github and only allowing projects from github to upload to npm/pypi is one of the goals here.
• Ekaros 4mo ago
  Seems like obvious solution for issues that CRA and RED causes. Have to fix those vulnerabilities one way or an other. Having a team or making teams using those to fix them when absolutely necessary is something they need. And that that point have to have way to push that stuff upstream so stuff can be marked resolved in tools... So things do get fixed, but it is not due to their graciousness.
• hatefulheart 4mo ago
  This is clearly a ploy to normalise slop PRs, slop in the FOSS world more generally and the timing is telling. We are in the midst of large open source projects rejecting LLM contributions, this is a response.
• epicsagas 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• seanclayton 4mo ago
  I yearn for the day I see a headline like "We All Depend on Open Source. We Will Fund It Together"
  • Splizard 4mo ago
    yea this headline is pretty disgusting
  • bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    Many of these bigger companies are "funding open source" by paying their employees to participate. Look at all of the corporate email addresses on the LKML for instance...
    • shimman 4mo ago
      How about they actually fund open source in the sense of letting the public dictate the direction of software for the country, not a cabal of unelected people that only care for pushing changes that benefit corporations. Open source would look drastically different, for the better I might add, if devs had a real choice in what to invest in. Corporate control of open sources has not benefited devs or society as it stands. Continuing to let corporations control should not continue to stand. There is no reason why big tech can have taxes imposed on them where the public can decide what is best for them and not the devs at Meta that are fine with profiting from a genocide or mass misery.
      • bigfishrunning 4mo ago
        You are absolutely welcome to start a project and exclude anyone who you think is unworthy of contributing. Software is not and never was a public good.
        • shimman 4mo ago
          No, what I would rather do (read as am actively doing) is help elect people into congress that want to rightfully destroy Silicon Valley and bring the benefit of public software to the masses.
• blueTiger33 4mo ago
  Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
• madprops 4mo ago
  Concerning globo-list. Centralization/takeover, aka an eventual "we will manage you"; which might be the true colors of the Linux Foundation. Forks would just get absorbed and used internally instead of depending on the performance of random informal earth citizens. The site is not even pleasant to read with that font. Villainy is parodied in this world heavily, names like Discord, Palantir, AI Companies talking about doom scenarios and enjoying it: so it's cool and expected to be a villain, to wrestle with the other kinds of power. I just want some fresh choices to polish the kind of company I want to get around me, which would likely be the opposite of who signed that letter.
• henry2266 4mo ago
  can someone explain me what is this page about?
• brynet 4mo ago
  Defending open source should begin with real, tangible support for both the projects and its developers. Not just words. With my OpenBSD developer hat on, getting new hardware in the hands of developers is really important, many of us are hacking on 5-10 year old thinkpads that need replacing. https://www.openbsd.org/want.html https://www.openbsd.org/want.html The OpenBSD foundation is ~50% away from its fundraising goal for 2026! https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2026.html https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2026.html
  • brynet 4mo ago
    Also in addition to funding the open source projects you use, if you can, please consider directly supporting individual contributors/developers personally who work on those projects, many are volunteers and even a small monthly contribution could mean the difference. https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
    • pradeshhpatel 4mo ago
      [flagged]
  • LtWorf 4mo ago
    I wanted to buy a couple of ubikeys to secure my gpg key (which can be used to upload to debian) and seems if I want them it's on me, yay!
• xpct 4mo ago
  Frankly, this year has shown that what's remaining of Open Source will be used for license laundering, and at a great scale. If you don't have a community backing you, there's almost no incentive remaining to start new OSS projects.
• dbvn 4mo ago
  sponsored by: all the bad guys
• Fizz43 4mo ago
  It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. Projects are maintained by their maintainers and get very little from the community. Commercial open source gets even less from the community. The only real value generated is corporate supported projects sharing with corporate supported projects. The average person is happy because they can also use these projects but ultimately they do nothing with it. The only people benefiting is the corporations that use this to build their products. I dont know if this is a good thing or not. On paper it seems fine but there is something that feels wrong about it and I dont know exactly what.
  • dboreham 4mo ago
    There never was "a community". The vast majority of all open source software is written by people paid by some corporation to do so.
    • bigfishrunning 4mo ago
      Just because people are paid to participate doesn't mean there's not a community; those paid contributors still generally have to build trust and maintain etiquette among people outside of their organizational structure.
  • bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    > It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. I would disagree with this, it's the same amount of community effort as it's always been. Big projects have big governance, and receive lots of patches. Smaller projects receive fewer patches. The community generally happens in Discord or IRC or on mailing lists, but it definitely exists. The real threat to "community effort" are drive-by low-effort LLM-generated Pull requests that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by a lot and make managing open source projects such a slog
    • Fizz43 4mo ago
      I fully understand that I may be completely wrong but I just dont see that a lot of effort comes from outside a projects core maintainers. Its always a core maintainer group usually paid by some company doing 95% of the work and the patches contributed are localizations, small bug fixes and weird edge cases. I'm not an open source maintainer so I could be completely off base here.
• dev1ycan 4mo ago
  It's time to ban every big player from contributing, it's clearly they're all malicious, this is just a way to force in AI code into open source.
• romaniv 4mo ago
  Nonsensical corporate posturing. "Microsoft will contribute expertise, resources, and AI technologies to help responsibly identify and fix vulnerabilities" As a reminder, Microsoft runs NPM and GitHub. Microsoft has access to the best AI models and massive data centers. Despite that, their own products are rapidly getting worse at security and their services are central hubs through which various exploits are propagated. They are not making things better, they are actively and rapidly making things worse. -- For a great example of how Microsoft deals with security issues within their own Open-Source projects, I recommend reading this GitHub thread: https://github.com/dotnet/efcore/issues/38257 https://github.com/dotnet/efcore/issues/38257 EF core currently distributes a version of SQLite that has a severe vulnerability. The issue was discovered over a year ago. It was fixed by SQLite within one week. EF core didn't mark their driver as vulnerable until a user recently reported it, got bounced around and argued with developers. The current stable version of .NET core will only get a fix in roughly two months.
  • playorizaya 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • josteink 4mo ago
      > So, MS builds VSCode - doesn't even fork Atom to do so. Looks identical to it. They built it from scratch. Bigger. Slower. Someone needs to fix a memory leak here. Atom was famously slow. Even among people using it and championing it. VSCode totally wowed people not just because it was faster, but because it was essentially the first «real» Electron-app which proved Electron-apps could have near native performance. You got this part 100% backwards.
      • jgalar 4mo ago
        > proved Electron-apps could have near native performance I don't think that's true at all. Try running Zed or Sublime.
      • playorizaya 4mo ago
• ecoglad 4mo ago
  [dead]
• jrm4 4mo ago
  "Confidentiality" Yeah, nah, I'm good. That's not "open-source." Or maybe it is, but it's not "Free Software," the better thing.
• taintlord 4mo ago
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• taintlord 4mo ago
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• playorizaya 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  Good stuff. > We are joined by Amazon Web Services… Does that include anything more than soundbites? This effort is likely to require organizational support, and funding. It’s not clear to me, that the organizations supplying the quotes, are “undersigned.” Not all of the quotes make it clear that the organization is doing anything more than asking an LLM to generate some text.
• debamitro 4mo ago
  As of now the site looks like a waitlist generation mechanism. Which itself is not a secure thing to do any more. Why would thousands of people give their email addresses to a website which doesn't even describe what they are going to do
• shimman 4mo ago
  A bunch of corporations that don't want their taxes to go up (which a sliver of which could be used to fund public software), along with their acolytes that will never mention worker solidarity or improving the material outcomes of developers. I'll hold my breath. Open source movement has been a massive success in devaluing skilled workers to except peanuts while American corporations suck up as much value as possible while giving less than half a percent in return. There needs to be a backlash against this corporate white washing.
• tsoukase 4mo ago
  Akrites were the Byzantine border defenders. If they defend the OSS community against AI then they have to try hard, because Ottomans won at last. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akritai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akritai
  • joquarky 4mo ago
    Perhaps that's the long con.
• remywang 4mo ago
  Currently the worst assault on open source is PR spam and the collapse of trust and culture that comes with it. Focus on that if you really want to defend open source.
• antran22 4mo ago
  Unrelated: the frontpage says: > the root of the name [Akritai] is the same word that gives us critical — which is exactly the software this effort exists to defend. This is pure corporate slop feels good bullshit generated by an LLM. “critical” comes from “kritikós” which means “related to judgement”. “Akritai” comes from “akron/ἄκρον” which means border. To be fair the article doesn’t sit well with me on its own, but making crappy, etymologically-untrue claim? Not on my watch.
• lilerjee 4mo ago
  Do you pay for the opensource projects which the "AI" companies used to train your LLMs? Used them first to train LLMs to earn money, then exploit them again?
• bmitch3020 4mo ago
  There's a massive difference between "big open source" and "small open source". LF has been doing a great job at representing their member companies, each of which has a significant investment in big open source projects, most of which are well funded and staffed. Presumably there's some transitive support given to their dependencies too. But then there is the very long tail of small open source projects, maintained by a single developer in their spare time, which collectively support the entire software ecosystem. And in every one of these announcements, there's rarely anything being done for this group. Changing this wouldn't be difficult. AI based vulnerability scanning of projects could be opt-in, where reports are only sent to the security contact listed in the project. This would avoid the risk of malicious actors scanning open source projects with the tool, and avoid sending reports to those projects that don't want them, while supporting the OSS software that doesn't make the "critical" threshold in LFs current criteria. Unfortunately that would also mean spending LF member funds on projects that may not directly benefit those LF members, so I'm not holding my breath.
• red1oon 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• ykonstant 4mo ago
  Unacceptable! If Oracle doesn't enter the consort, there is no way I am trusting it to be a legitimate defender of open source!
• paulhinz 4mo ago
  This is a great mission. Open source accelerates software innovation, establishing foundation software that can be freely leveraged. That has been true for decades and therefore a great deal of critical software infra is open source. Because nefarious actors can now use AI to rapidly identify vulnerabilities, this allows a coordinated response across an extremely large number of major software providers. Those using or building on critical open source should be part of Project Akrites.