https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/advanced-settings/sudo/
I guess they didn't pay a cent to Todd Miller.
Can donate there.
My bank account is basically empty but I will contribute a few bucks.
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/images/photos/todd_ducktape_man.gif
Uhm, how did Todd relieve himself in that costume?
There's a TLS listener in sudo? This project seems to have a tonne of features it shouldn't.
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/256/run0.ht...
IBM should be able to send a decent amount to Todd once in a while, but based upon how much IBM supports ssh ($0), all they are proving is they are very cheap and only wants be a parasite living off other's work.
/s
Really though, it is remarkable just how high we've built this towering house of cards on the selfless works of individuals. The geek in me immediately begins meditating on OSS funding mechanisms I've seen in the past, and what might work today. Then I remember that I don't believe it can work, but hope desperately that people like Todd can keep paying rent and continue getting some satisfaction from the efforts.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> This project is not a fork of the Unix/Linux sudo project, nor is it a port of that sudo project. Instead, Sudo for Windows is a Windows-specific implementation of the sudo concept.
Core tools like sudo have survived things like this before
But also sudo has A LOT of features that 95% of people don't use. Just checkout `man sudo` to get a sense for this. And it includes plugins like the popular visudo plugin. You can see from the release cadence that real improvements continue to be made. Though it is a bit more work to secure a moving target.
But of course, that's silly. Of every piece of software has to be written. I should probably throw the guy a few bucks, considering his code runs in basically every big script on the planet.
And they start making videos about, mentioning the sponsors. There are better options to get money.
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.
Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.
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.
Isn't it done and finished, after 30 years of development?
Thanks to sudo-rs: this stolen valor project made me want to financially support the original author.
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.
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.
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
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.
Unfortunately, it seems like either the moneyed folks don't care or the current financial structure simply does not support this.
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.
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).
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.
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.
From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].
[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
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
Yes and no, feature bloat usually justify themselves innocently and once you go down that slope there is no return.
The hardest thing to do in software is commit yourself to a set of feature and protect it from any "helpful additions", naming might be the second hardest.
(It has to do with sudoers entries having a host field, since the file is designed to be deployed to multiple servers, which may each want differing sudoers rules. It’s truly 90s era software.)
Open-source seems to be fragmented into three groups now. Large enterprise open-source like Kubernetes or OpenStack where the license seems more like a legal agreement amongst vendors to not sue each other. Legacy open-source projects that are getting by on brand recognition and sheer willpower. And a whole bunch of noise from people who are looking to leverage open-source into a job of some sort.
I'm not sure what the solution is...
Greenpeace is a (non-profit) corporation. Unions are corporations. Municipalities. Colleges and universities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
Should they have to pay?
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.
I don’t know anything about the history here; it’s a genuine question.
The former is extremely rare; platform churn alone will usually demand updates, even if your code is otherwise airtight. Forces generally beyond your access will demand that your code is able to conform to platform standards. The demand this places can be very variable and depends more on the platform than you. (Windows has low platform churn since it's possible to futz with compat features, Linux is extremely variable on your codebase, MacOS is fairly constant and from what I know about mobile phones, you're basically signing up to forever maintenance duty).
The latter is much more common; sure, sudo still gets updates but most of those won't be new features. Specification wise, sudo is "done". It does what it needs to, it's interface is defined and there aren't going to be any strange surprises when I run sudo between any system made in the past 10 years or so.
The problem is that when you're selling software, demanding compensation for the former is a hard sell since it's things customers won't see or necessarily care about. Demanding compensation for the latter is much more obviously acceptable.
Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add.
https://mastodon.social/@grishka/116005782128372247
“Software is never done” is a myth they tell to keep extracting money from you.
A lot of the time, failing to to finish software indicates a badly defined scope.
What about the Rust rewrite (sudo-rs)? I think it shows people are interested in maintaining and/or modernizing tools taken for granted.
Sure, I think a lot of those donations would amount to a few pennies or so at once, but I feel like a lot more people would be willing to support creators if they didn't have to constantly choose which to support.
(and the old logo) ;)
I'm not sure what can be gained for further development of the OG c sudo, add security patches of course.
But fund adding yet another feature 99.9% of users will never use? I can't fathom the justification for that. Just adding attack surface at this point.
Rightly both doas and the *-rs drops ins intend to drop most of those unnecessary features.
On a long enough timeline, those fixes become fewer and less frequent as the codebase improves, but there is no "done" in software unfortunately. Hell, entropy itself means nothing is ever done, just in an ever-changing state.
Of course, 20+ years ago a big feature was platform compatibility, and since then we've gone from 10+ to 2ish, so if it's not explicitly enabling retrocomputing, it should be getting simpler, right?
From time to time, I would reflect on the fact that Microsoft and other commercial suppliers were getting paid for providing services to us, but I was expected to work for free.
Note: this page tends be neglected and is only updated occasionally. The links to the left are where the useful bits are hiding.
For the past 30+ years I’ve been the maintainer of sudo. I’m currently in search of a sponsor to fund continued sudo maintenance and development. If you or your organization is interested in sponsoring sudo, please let me know.
I also work on OpenBSD, though I’m not as active there as I once was.
In the past, I’ve made large contributions to ISC cron, among other projects.
The constant fear of lawyers that using some GPL lib will infest entire codebase of their project with GPL is a real problem that stops many corporations from contributing in the first place.
I reckon closed-loop systems can be ‘done’ every bit as much as hardware systems can be if the design, debugging and implementation are disciplined enough.
A tool like sudo can never be done because it integrates with the constantly updating OS and will always need maintenance.
That tool is still very much in active use in my industry, and we'll need to figure out what to do with some 10000 fla files that we need to occasionally edit and republish (hint: the solution probably involves a certain Swedish software repository).
Platform churn updates are a failure to limit scope and dependency. If you stick with stable standards like C99/POSIX/X11/SDL, test strictly and build liberally etc., then who cares what the Web/Qt/Metal people are doing?
Because new needs arise over time. For example, when I started in IT the "sudoedit" functionality was not present and so allowing someone to do "sudo vi …" would allow them breakout of the editor when it was running as root.
With sudoedit you can give people permissions to edit particular files with elevated permissions.
> Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).
They did not "give up": they found they needed only much simpler functionality shipped in the base OS. For example, sudo has functionality to talk to LDAP (which I've used at multiple jobs over the years), but is not needed for a local-only box. Once you need centralized account and privilege management, doas becomes much less useful.
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.
Software is never "done".
The underlying APIs are always changing. The compilers and system libraries are changing.
Featuritis is a thing, but rolling it back is non-trivial as there are folks who depend upon it.
If someone expects to be paid for the use of their software, releasing it as open source is not what they want.
If a maintainer of a software project starts trying to demand payment or threatening to change license terms, it’s a reasonable response for a company to fork it or build their own solution.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
It's copyright law which should go away.
I wonder if sudo would be better off joining one of those open source foundations instead of staying solo. It's too small to justify a meaningful amount of contribution to these companies, at which point the bureaucratic overhead of dealing with it probably kills the motivation
* skip the hard part: designing, getting user feedback and designing again;
* get straight to the fun part: coding in their favorite language after a well-established and proven design;
* get to call themselves "creator of XXX-rs", where "XXX" is a well-known brand and "-rs" is often overlooked.
Except when they killed all 32bit games a few years ago with Catalina.
You give it away for free so don’t be surprised to get abused. Human nature working at its best and worst here.
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.
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.
The Rust smokescreen is mostly being used to slowly eradicate the GPL.
Like Lenin said, "Who stands to gain?"
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.
People having control over their computer (and even having the right to share what they run on their computer!) is completely compatible with people paying for software labor.
People aren't vampires because they're on top, they're on top because they're vampires.
Shit flows downstream
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
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.
Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/adobe-animate-is-shutting-...
> for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary
I'll believe it when I see it. Keeping something running for a long time is a lot easier task than building something that can be run in an ever changing world.
Given that it's that old I'd wager that it isn't runnable on/compileable for ARM64 without some kind of maintenance. And if it's written in an interpretable language there is a good chance that the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL by now.
> A lot of the time, failing to to finish software indicates a badly defined scope.
And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
And how many of these tools are mission critical to the point that they are installed on almost every Linux box in existence, probably invoked tens of billions of times per day, both by humans and software, and the entire world would be in deep goddamn trouble if there was a serious security flaw that doesn't get fixed immediately?
Because that's what `sudo` is.
And no, such software is never "done".
The reasons for software churn are economic, cultural, and psychological, not technological.
That is scary! I may need to look more at openbsd
Then again, you usual Friday outing of FANG engineers may have more money than some nonprofits too.
This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.
Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.
rms is the Marx of the 20th Century. GPL is freedom from corporate oppression.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?
Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.
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.
It’s not perfect, but it is already something that is being done.
would it be better if they didn't have fun coding it? is something worse if it was fun to make?
Pedantically, the “stolen valor” metaphor absolutely doesn’t fit here; you’re just griping about the “sudo brand” being used in another project’s title (which … citation needed, and so what? Is “doas” not committing theft but “sudo-improved” is?)
More generally, that’s an easy case to make against any software you don’t like: “it’s just reimplementing $whatever and trying to pretend to be the original therefore it’s unethical”. Some rewrites are good, and a huge benefit of the act of rewriting is that you do have a clear blueprint and understanding of the requirements (hell, Linux was a rewrite). Should the original creators of a thing be the only people who can ethically rewrite it? Where’s the line here?
You don’t get to act so self-righteous when you do absolutely nothing to justify the assertion that sudo-rs is “useless”.
I look forward to hearing your argument that doesn’t end in “the memory safety footguns of C are massively overstated”, or “there is no value in having a sudo alternative that ditches antiquated, insecure functionality”
"Paypal keeps $0.30 + 2.9% of every donation, so please keep anything less than $0.32 as they have enough money already."
i think Cash App has the lowest fees i've seen at like $0.01 which would still be too much.
not saying it is impossible - but likely not viable directly with the current payment providers.
- 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
I encourage you to peek at their changelog (https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/) for more insight into why this project is still under active development.
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.
If person in country X is accepting payments (micro or regular) directly from customers/donors in country Y they are then running an international business. That can have income tax, sale tax, VAT, and probably other tax collecting and reporting requirements in one or both countries.
It's a big can of worms you probably don't want to deal with unless you are making significant money from Y. Multiply all that by the number of different countries you get paid from.
The best way to fix the transaction fee problem is probably to use an intermediary. For micropayments people (payers and payees) have accounts at the intermediary. Payers preload their account with a payment large enough that the transaction fees are only a tiny percentage, then can direct how that money is distributed. On the payee side the intermediary waits until the payer has received enough to be able to do a transfer to the payees bank account without transaction fees eating too much.
The intermediary can also fix the tax problem. The way that works is that the intermediary operates as a legal entity in both country X and Y. Payers interact solely with the legal entity in their country, and payees interact solely with the legal entity in their country. Payers and payees then only have to deal with their own country's tax system.
The problem here is who should run the intermediary service? I doubt people will be able to agree on that. What we probably need is a system where there can be multiple intermediary services, but the services talk to each other so if say I want to donate to project Foo and Foo and I use different services I tell mine to send Foo a micropayment and my service and Foo's service make that happen.
This could work similar to the way peering works on the internet backbone.
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.
Practically nobody downloads and installs sudo directly from the project website; people install it with their distribution of choice. The agreement could be automated and included in the licensing process. ie: the license gives specific distributions access to the software (either via paid or other agreed-upon terms appropriate to the distribution) and perhaps individual licensing terms for non-commercial entities.
Of course, the bigger ask in this decade is in use for training LLMs. OSS shouldn't be laundered through an LLM (IMHO) for license avoidance. Maybe some projects are OK with that (eg: many BSD licensed works.) There are some that likely aren't.
That seems like an area that's ripe for innovation. What does it take to get setup on a platform like Patreon? Seems like something similar ought to be setup for open source/independent development, probably an idealistic nonprofit.
> and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
All the organizations who really ought to pay are already setup to do all that, and do it all the time.
> 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
What we need is innovation. Maybe a license that has a trip-wire? If not enough money is voluntarily deposited into a tip jar over a certain period of time, the license requires a modest payment from all for-profit organizations of a particular size.
That's up-front, is for the most part free, and incentivizes some payment.
Oh, but it's so much more beautiful than that! You're really underselling it! It's not "the reason stated by the customer support", it's:
The reason snarkily paraphrased by a Mastodon post Which quotes a Twitter post Which quotes a Bluesky post Which tells a story about a conversation with an Adobe customer service rep.
Surely that tongue-in-cheek Mastodon post increases the information that we have about this incident by exactly Zero.
Very useful when you're running fleets of systems that are more pet than cattle.
Ubuntu/Debian are moving to sudo using SSS to talk to LDAP (versus the current sudo-ldap package).
Features are added because people cannot do X and want to, and so it is added.
I'm happy to have a spectrum of privilege-escalation utilities of varying capabilities, but just because one person does not need certain functionality (like talking to LDAP) does not mean I don't.
You need to have an alternative, and it needs to be a credible and reliable one, to ensure that it does not end up being the case that one scam is replaced with another scam.
What “lack of profitability”? They just reported a record quarter. Adobe shoves full Creative Cloud subscriptions down everyone’s throats; buying one tool, especially when it’s not one of the flagships, is uncommon. What exactly are they losing by just letting Animate be?
> And if it's written in an interpretable language
I have never ever ever had to change shell, Ruby, or JavaScript code because “the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL”. Never. That code keeps happily running, doing its work, with whatever version of the interpreter I have available in whatever box.
> And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
So what? That’s perfectly fine. Do you drink milk out of a baby bottle? Do you ride a bike with training wheels? It’s perfectly fine to build a tool for a purpose and a time and place and let it exist there for the people who care for it. That’s also true of video games (which, lest we forget, are software). In a world where people are constantly complaining about software updates moving shit around, removing features, and adding crap they don’t want, plenty of people appreciate that the things they like continue to work as they always have.
Over the years I’ve had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance.
I’ve also had to spend nearly a whole day fixing the webUI when iOS’s wonderful liquid glass came out.
Yeah, although "finished" software is antithetical to this always have new features to push onto your customers subscription model, so it's not entirely unrelated.
Having said that I still find it strange. I can imagine it might not be able to ride on the AI bubble, and perhaps animators are especially vocal about not wanting AI in their tools. But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable? They do have a subscription model, and customers, so people are paying for this product.
Compared to other digital art, the data for vector animation takes relatively little space to store. It also requires much less resources to render than other forms of video, and rasterized video output should compress really well compared to alternatives, especially with modern codecs that are not only optimized for regular film. So surely it shouldn't be that expensive to maintain for them compared to all their other projects.
Unlike modern physical products, software often has a contiguous lineage, with less individual hard cuts between releases, that e.g. necessitate setting up a new production line for each iteration.
Of course you can call individual releases "done" but then you also have to accept that the same realities apply to it that it's utility will decay over time same as e.g. household appliances do, where you also wouldn't use one that's 40 years old.
Calling a software project as a whole "done" (and claiming that it doesn't have bugs and doesn't need maintenance) would be akin to Apple saying the iPhone (the whole product line/smartphone niche) is "done".
But now we don't live in the age of scarcity of content. On the contrary, content creators are competing for a possibility to get into consumers' attention span and push their agenda (ads). Everything has changed.
Removing all copyright restriction will not decrease the amount of content available for a person through their lifetime even a few percent.
Stuff written for one version of MacOS will probably work for the next few versions, but there's just as likely a chance that Apple has decided that you need to do a full on update of all your older tools. Things like dropping Rosetta, 32-bit from the kernel and so on and so forth. There's not really any recourse, unlike Windows and Linux where you can usually finagle a workable solution without having to resort to updating everything all the time (so platform churn exists, but a user can theoretically choose to avoid it).
This is unlike phones, where there's basically no real expectations for when you need to update stuff, so it becomes a case of "you need to test every version". The lack of respect for tool stability is just one other reason why the mobile ecosystem is the user-hostile hell it is; this platform churn pretty much is one of the two roots of why mobile apps are Like That. (The other being that running your own choice of tools is treated as a privilege, not a right.)
We agree that that was its initial stated intention.
However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").
Maintenance cost (which you claim doesn't exist) of the engineers that they are planning to staff on other project they are assuming will be more profitable. Of course that's just a bet and not a sure thing.
> I have never ever ever had to change shell, Ruby, or JavaScript code because “the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL”.
I think we are living in different realities. Almost every (open source) project that I encounter that's 10+ years old isn't runnable without changes.
> Do you drink milk out of a baby bottle? Do you ride a bike with training wheels?
Do you still drive a Ford Model T?
Even if you add functionality to phone home, it can be removed by all but the dumbest offenders.
We have carved out a class of engagements, labeled it deeply asocial, criminalized it and now we pursue people who engage in it through legal means.
Business really doesn't have this. Personal example - last week I was at a place where the business owner tried to overcharge me by an order of magnitude and then verbally attacked me when I caught him and backed out of the transaction.
His google and yelp reviews are full of people claiming false charges and all kinds of fraud, refusal to correct and repeated abuse until they closed their cards. It's wildly obvious what's going on here and I was on the ball enough to catch it.
I contacted the police and they said "well you should call the BBB or something". It's dozens of reviews of clear credit card fraud and for some reason because he's a merchant, doesn't seem to hit the radar.
These are purely criminal matters - people acting habitually in bad faith with ill intent in a brazenly dishonest manner.
Whether it's plundering the commons, polluting the public discourse, or breaking other types of social compacts, these should be treated the same as any other crime.
Sorry, I wasn't precise with my wording. What I meant to say was "less profitable than the perceived AI opportunities they could do with the same engineers".
I would expect another system to query ldap.
> this is like saying “what do you mean post-modernist architecture, architecture predates modernism”.
https://lobste.rs/s/kaftkn/i_started_identifying_corporate_d...
Physical appliances decay because of wear and tear, which digital products are uniquely immune to.
Replacing and fixing physical wear and tear is more like having to occasionally clean your logs folder, or reinstall your OS. Admin maintenance on a specific installation, not updates to the product from the developer. The product itself stays the same.
Software churn, updates that change the product itself and not just the way it's run, are more like General Electric requiring you let one of their employees into your house to paint the appliance a new color every month.
> Calling a software project as a whole "done" (and claiming that it doesn't have bugs and doesn't need maintenance) would be akin to Apple saying the iPhone (the whole product line/smartphone niche) is "done".
Which seems like it would be fine? What do 95% people use their smartphone for, that an iPhone from 10 years ago was not already able to do? Besides, this comparison is a bit circular as software dropping support is often the part that forces consumers to upgrade hardware.
Hardware products without software churn do in fact get used basically forever. When they do break, they can also be replaced with the exact same product, without all the issues that running old software gets you.
Apple could make a forever-iPhone that lasts 10 years, or 40 years. But it's more profitable, competitive, exciting, and convenient to release a new product line every year (while turning old hardware into e-waste via software updates).
I'm not saying it's better or worse that things are this way, but it does cause some problems and should not be presented as inevitable.
- It should run on an maintained OS (which should run on available hardware), so whatever changes are necessary to keep pace with that
- It may want to add optimizations regarding newer CPU architectures
- It uses a compiler, so whatever changes necessary to stay on a maintained version of the compiler
- It uses cryptography, so whatever changes necessary to stay up to date with latest cryptographic research to provide a secure solution, as well as updating cryptographic libraries to not be exposed to CVEs found in them. It also exists in the context of one/multiple jurisdictions, so possibly also changes to comply with interference in sound cryptography (let's hope not).
And all of those are just part of the things to keep up with the world around you evolving. Of course there may also be bugs to fix in the code itself, and/or new ones created by doing any of the changes above.
Even their definition of "complete"[0] includes "active maintenance" and "still much to do".
You do have points, though, but there might at least be some actions that you and others can take in this case. Maybe a medium change like changing the law on this specific point might make sense.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79753701/ios-26-safari-w...
Many of the bugs were fixed in 26.1, but still, I had to fix it to use it.
I was surprised that not much of the entire web was broken, but a cursory search of commits showed that the WebKit/Apple team took the approach of coding in site specific hacks for popular sites (eg instagram, google search!) for iOS 26.
The point about household appliances that I was trying to make wasn't about individual appliances decaying (= breaking down), but about the utility of a model decaying over time, as it e.g. becomes uncompetitive because it has worse energy efficiency than it's modern counterparts (or in the case of refrigerators uses harmful greenhouse gases).
If there's an accumulation of complaints against this merchant then that should warrant an investigation.
The police have like half the local city budget, can't they do their job?
For now.
> There aren't many hardware primitives that would speed it up,
For now.
> although AVX2 and similar would help process ChaCha20.
So, there's at least a bullet point for experimental branching.
Also, the WireGuard Tunnel Manager on macOS is far from done.