this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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They haven't particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it's happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc.

(The sceptical tone isn't because of disbelief of Collin, it's because we don't know enough about the situation to be able to say Collin is or isn't telling the truth here.)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I am starting to believe that we shouldn't rely on this type of labor product in the first place. Something as critical as OpenSSH should be (and possibly is) funded by the users and also NOT use third party libs because it's dangerous, as this incidence showed. FOSS is free not as in beer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I‘m not sure what you‘re suggesting. Every piece of FOSS software is made by someone and the a lot of it builds on top of some upstream thing. Otherwise everyone would have to rebuild from scratch and FOSS would break down. Or am I missing your point?

Also, you cant make every 16 yr old user pay for a foss product. Companies must be made to pay for foss and downstream teams must be made to send parts of their income upstream, no matter if they make enough.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Good luck with that.

Commercial and closed source software is no safer, and may even be using the same foss third-party libs under the hood that you're trying to avoid. Just because foss licences generally require you to disclose you're using them, it doesn't mean that's what actually happens.

And even if, by some miracle, they have a unique codebase - how secure is that? Even if an attacker can't reach the source, they can still locate exploits and develop successful attacks against it.

At its core, all software relies upon trust. I don't know the answer to this, and we'll be here again soon enough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I'm not saying that they should go closed source.

Your part on using foss third-party libs also makes no sense because my theoretical assumption is that they're not used.

Your argument bent my logic for the sake of making it weaker. Please counter my argument without altering it, and I indeed admit it's imperfect. But this particular lineage of comments is not constructive at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

In what way did I bend your logic? I found your logic quite twisted to start with, and don't think I did alter it further.

Also - not constructive? But you're the one that's being negative. I'm merely trying to point out that you'll have a very hard job not relying on foss as it stands today. Where we go from here is a much bigger question, but we've all got very used to having free software and, as I said, even if we all start paying huge amounts of money for the alternative, that doesn't mean it'll be safer. In fact, I rather suspect it'll be less safe, as issues like this then have a commercial interest in not disclosing security problems. (As evidenced already in numerous commercial security exploits that were known and hidden)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

In what way did I bend your logic?

Well for starters, the person above was pretty explicitly NOT advocating for reliance on third party libs, and perhaps more importantly, they were not in any way suggesting reliance on closed source software. In essence, diametrically the opposite of everything you were talking about.

I think your confusion came in their phrasing of not relying on "labor product." I took them to mean, not relying on people committing their free labor to sustain FOSS. I think you must have read that as not supporting FOSS.

Also - not constructive? But you’re the one that’s being negative.

I think they are right. You took the exact opposite of what they said and "corrected" them for it, which is irritating as hell. And now you're doubling down, which is worse. I would be irritated too!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Learn to read. Or learn logic. I'm just sincerely suggesting you to do those because I don't have the opinion you think I have.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

A side note. Proprietary closed source software totally uses opensource components. They may or may not disclose it, and they have to offer up what they used, however they are often making the disclosure a fine print item. We support a large proprietary software, we see the memos come through about what bug fixes or opensource library has an issue or vulner. The customers can aign up for this also, but I bet 99% of them don't sign up. And if they were polled on if the software if it was open/closed I'm sure they would say closed only