Posted by wodniok 4 hours ago
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/i-started-identifying-corporate-...
The post-open source space is indeed a very exciting space in 2026
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.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.
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
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
It's roughly the same complexity (one drop-in file) to implement.
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.
For my part, I want none of it. I find this reduction of a significant philosophy to some kind of base tax-and-distribute mechanism distasteful. I don't like communities were this stuff is big and they always want to run some taxation scheme where they redirect money to their own personal pet projects. It is fortunate that modern tools are good enough to build personal insulation from this stuff.
Imagine the farce of Apply HN repeated continuously. Simply awful.
https://www.millert.dev/therm/
Server exhaust fan temperature was typically 94°F (ranged 92°F to 96°F) over the previous week and has climbed to 97°F.
We need to find better models. Even if it is just "low(er)" payment; that would still be better than zero or near zero payment.
may also fund retirements for certain individuals, and there is for sure enough free juice to get it started in a very reasonable way. these people really deserve it, the same way Nobels extist, etc.
The Largely Untold Story Of How One Guy In California Keeps The World’s Computers Running On The Right Time Zone: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-o...
It's disgusting that maintainers of critical projects have to go through the humiliation of begging for money, and absurd to suggest they all hang out Kofi or PAtreon banners. Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally. I'm baffled that some entity like the Linux Software Foundation isn't administering this already.
For a lot of open source projects, if you have a normal day job and spend a few hours per week on a project, then the project just never gets very big. It exists, may have a few users. But on a larger scale, nobody knows it exists.
The exceptions are projects where developers spend a lot of time on the project at the expense of a day job. Though there is the possibility that they may have a hard time having a day job in the first place, which may have let to the situation with the open source project.
In general, I think we do have a culture problem where we think projects need to be successful. And people working on a project 'need' to support users (who in general don't pay).
And that expectation of free work happens throughout the open source ecosystem as well. Distributions expect projects to fix bugs for free. Open source projects expect libraries and compilers to be maintained.
Ultimately, change has to come from people who refuse to work for free. Doing something as a hobby for free is perfectly fine. As long as it stays within the scope of a hobby project.
Not if we don't make it easy for them. I had Claude whip up fundcli a while ago, but this post got me to finally upload it. It goes through your http://atuin.sh/ history (raw .bash_history/.*history doesn't have enough information) and generates links to projects for you to donate to.
git clone https://github.com/fragmede/fundcli
uv run src/fundcli/cli.py analyze
uv run ./src/fundcli donate --amount 100
Unfortunately, it seems like either the moneyed folks don't care or the current financial structure simply does not support this.