If you skim past the less-interesting project history, there's interesting description of some dynamics that apply to a lot of open source projects, including:

> Even if it is a valid security flaw, it is clear why it might rankle a maintainer. The report is not coming from a user of the project, and it comes with no attempt at a patch to fix the vulnerability. It is another demand on an unpaid maintainer's time so that, apparently, a security research company can brag about the discovery to promote its services.

> If Wellnhofer follows the script expected of a maintainer, he will spend hours fixing the bugs, corresponding with the researcher, and releasing a new version of libxml2. Sveshnikov and Positive Technologies will put another notch in their CVE belts, but what does Wellnhofer get out of the arrangement? Extra work, an unwanted CVE, and negligible real-world benefit for users of libxml2.

> So, rather than honoring embargoes and dealing with deadlines for security fixes, Wellnhofer would rather treat security issues like any other bug; the issues would be made public as soon as they were reported and fixed whenever maintainers had time. Wellnhofer also announced that he was stepping down as the libxslt maintainer and said it was unlikely that it would ever be maintained again. It was even more unlikely, he said, with security researchers ""breathing down the necks of volunteers.""

> [...] He agreed that ""wealthy corporations"" with a stake in libxml2 security issues should help by becoming maintainers. If not, ""then the consequence is security issues will surely reach the disclosure deadline (whatever it is set to) and become public before they are fixed"".

As a maintainer of several open source projects over my life, I really hated these so called security researchers and their CVEs. I routinely fixed more impacting bugs due to user reports, but when one of these companies found a big, they made a whole theater around it, while the impact being pretty small. Pretty much any bug, except maybe a typo in the UI, is a security bug. It gets tiring very soon. And with the CVEs comes a lot of publicity and a lot of demands.

Don't like something? Fork and fix.

Unhappy with a maintainer? Fork and maintain it yourself.

Some open source code creates issues in your project? Fix it and try to upstream. Upstream is not accepted? Fork and announce the fix.

Unpaid open source developers owe you nothing, you can't demand anything, their work is already a huge charitable contribution to humanity. If you can do better — fork button is universally available. Don't forget to say thank you to original authors while you stay on the shoulders of giants.

    > ...there are currently four bugs marked with the security label in the libxml2 issue tracker. Three of those were opened on May 7 by Nikita Sveshnikov, a security researcher who works for a company called Positive Technologies.

I'm confused. Why doesn't Positive Technologies submit a patch or offer to pay the lead maintainer to implement a fix?

FYI, Wiki tells me:

    > Positive Technologies is a Russian information security research company and a global leader in cybersecurity.

Understand the stance, but the big corps using it (Apple, Google, Microsoft) are using it and acknowledge it silently at risk. It's not entirely fair though, Google did make a donation.

The only obstacle here appears to be the psychological issues of the maintainers themselves. I know it maybe hard to say "fuck off" but they will have to learn to say that to stop being exploited.

> It was certainly promoted on the project web site as a capable and portable toolkit for the purpose of parsing XML.

This is a garbage criticism. It’s perfectly adequate for that for almost everyone. If you are shipping it in a browser to billions of people, that’s a very unique situation, and any security issues are a you problem.

Not sure if this is intended to be a “show both sides” journalism thing but it’s a totally asshole throwaway comment.

    The point is that libxml2 never had the quality to be used in mainstream browsers or operating systems to begin with. It all started when Apple made libxml2 a core component of all their OSes. Then Google followed suit and now even Microsoft is using libxml2 in their OS outside of Edge. This should have never happened. Originally it was kind of a growth hack, but now these companies make billions of profits and refuse to pay back their technical debt, either by switching to better solutions, developing their own or by trying to improve libxml2.
    The behavior of these companies is irresponsible. Even if they claim otherwise, they don't care about the security and privacy of their users. They only try to fix symptoms.

Hear, hear!

GPL was a good idea

Bigger companies have either policies or have policies derived from regulatory demands on the software they are using for their products and services. Defects must be fixed within a certain timeframe. Software suppliers and external code must be vetted. Have such a widely used library explicitly not maintained in theory should make it a no-go area forcing either removal or ongoing explicit security audits - it may well be cheaper for any of them to take over the full maintenance load. Will be interesting to watch.

Also the not so relevant security bugs are not just costs to the developers but the library churn is also costing more and more users if the user is forced by policy to follow in a timely manner the latest versions in the name of "security".