Remind me...
....which Tech companies using this have record stock prices?
Oh yeah all of the greedy parasitic scumbags.
Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support
It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive. It's a common trope in the open-source computing community that a small number of solitary maintainers do a disproportionate amount of work …
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thursday 5th February 2026 11:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Remind me...
And walking out of one slaver's building and into another's is not coercion? Trump is not worried about the costs of ACA per se, but how it loosens control by the oligarchy. All employment is a ponzi at the exploitation of the employed. Collusion to entrapment for exploitation is coercion. Non-compete agreements are tacit acknowledgement of exploitation, otherwise, why not compete?
-
Thursday 5th February 2026 11:56 GMT kmorwath
Re: Remind me...
The best slaves are those who believe they are not - which was what happened to communism, and in any authoritarian state. Little chances they can revolt. Brainwash them they have to work for free for the "better, common good" and you can become rich and powerful exploiting them at will. Read Animals Farm, once in your life.
And reading at comments like yours, it's clear why we are going towards new dictatures - there are many people who just wait to be able to exploit others without noone hindering it. It's always greed that dooms freedom.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 22:02 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Re: Remind me...
All very well and good, but shaming doesn't usually work.
Perhaps it is time for the major distributions to demand £$€ 10 a year for support. They can then feed the money to the maintainers of things like sudo. Those who don't pay can build the software from source and maintain it themselves. They are free to complain and build their own distros if they have the time.
The problem of un/underfunded open source development is not going to go away.
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 11:03 GMT demon driver
Speech vs. beer
If it isn't both, it isn't free.
The old and still unanswered question is how to keep it free – even if just for everyone except those few who both profit greatly from it and have tens of thousands of times the funds it would need to fully finance its development and its developers.
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 11:35 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Re: Remind me...
Lots of downvotes. Well, let's read their proposals for maintaining sudo.
I expect it will be 'let the big cloud companies pay'. That's not good enough. If you are using something you are still a user.
Are you going to step up to the plate and maintain this free of charge for everyone? If not, why not? And then, when you feel your time is being taken for granted, we can all point our fingers at you and say 'too bad'.
There are a lot of toxic voices in the OSS world - a sense of entitlement, usually from people who contribute nothing but their bile.
-
-
-
-
Thursday 5th February 2026 12:57 GMT kmorwath
Re: Remind me...
That's why a lot of FOSS projects changed and are changing licences - but one you published the code with another licence, bug companies like Google and AWS will simply fork it for their own use.
You can what MinIO did - shutting down the public repo wholly - but the previous code is still there, even if no new code will be published.
Anyway the writing is on the wall - unless FOSS is subsidized by other interests - namely data hoarding and subsequent ad slinging, dynamic pricing and customers' behavioural modifications, it's not a feasible business model, where do money come from?
-
-
Friday 6th February 2026 16:05 GMT kmorwath
Re: Remind me...
In which world do you believe you live in? People don't pay what they can steal without issues. FOSS can't change mankind - not even religions could...
And today we see outstanding example of pure, enormous greed being promoted at the top. Good luck with "being reasonable"....
-
-
Saturday 7th February 2026 18:39 GMT kmorwath
Re: Remind me...
I have full interest in changing it, just I don't believe a religion like FOSS can change it.
Paying people properly for their work is one way to change it. Waiting for charitable companies is not a way to change it. And brainwashing people into believing they can work for free and maybe one day someone will pay them is not a way to change it, it a way to endure world becomes worse and worse and people are exploited by a few ones.
Read for example: https://theintercept.com/2026/01/02/empire-ai-sam-altman-colonialism/
"Empires similarly consolidate a lot of economic might by exploiting extraordinary amounts of labor and not actually paying that labor sufficiently or at all. "
You've all are being blindsided by not having to pay for software. Because greed is one of the most powerful insticts of people. That's why you post as AC - are you ashamed of your opinions? I'm not.
-
Saturday 7th February 2026 21:25 GMT jake
Re: Remind me...
I have been contributing to the FOSS world since before BSD was BSD (and indeed, before Microsoft met an IBM PC). Quite frankly, I have never thought about getting paid for it for one simple reason: It doesn't matter.
Read that again, it's important: It doesn't matter.
I wrote code, created patches, chased down bugs, wrote documentation, and all the other bits & bobs that go into FOSS because I am extremely selfish. I wanted it to work for ME, my way, in my time. Once it worked the way I wanted it to work, it solved a problem that I had, which more than paid for the time and effort that I put into it.
Then I released it to the wild, without caring if anyone else needed it. It's MINE, it scratched my itch ... now, if you have the same itch feel free to make use of my scratching post. No point in you re-inventing the wheel to do the same job ... and better, it frees you up to work on something to fix another itch.
Thankfully, other people have many other itches. In aggregate, over time, and over the generations, we have created something useful. This will continue indefinitely.
-
Monday 9th February 2026 14:43 GMT kmorwath
Re: Remind me...
Where does your income come from? It might doesn't matter for your because your live like a monk, or you have another nice source of income, mr. Stakanov.
Other people don't have that., or don't like to live like a monk, so they MUST be paid for their work. Telling people they shoud work for FREE while others make tons of money exploiting their work is utter, pure greed.
But I understand your issue (and Stallman one) - before the PC money were made selling hardware, so companies may give away the source code, especially since nobody has their own mainframe or mini to run it. The PC changed everything - now money was made writng and selling software.
But old people like you can't accept changes, and being paid for doing something else, don't want to pay those who actually write software. But software paid by other interests, especially bevihoural control. is inherently "enshittifed".
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 23:25 GMT DS999
What does it need a maintainer for?
It is already way too loaded down with "features" when it should be simple and streamlined so it is easy to audit. If a security issue is found someone at Redhat or whatever will fix it and push the fix upstream.
This is the perfect example of software that SHOULD NOT have a day to day maintainer because that just encourages people to add more crap that a security critical application does not need or want.
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 13:12 GMT LionelB
Re: What does it need a maintainer for?
> Like measles
Well there's a cautionary tail. The UK recently lost it's measles elimination status because, it seems, too many users have not been applying the appropriate security updates.
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 17:18 GMT martinusher
Re: What does it need a maintainer for?
Measels is only a risk if people get complacent and assume they don't need to be vaccinated.
Unlike viruses or just about everything else software doesn't evolve on its own. A program written decades ago will still work exactly the same today as it did when it was first written. Environments change, of course, but for a utility like this KISS is paramount Its a good example of a piece of code that has to be 100% deterministic. So it should be simple to maintain (I'd do it if nobody else wanted to.....but I'm likely not the best candidate for the job).
(The overriding problem I've had with programmers, especially applications programmers, is "Idle hands make the Devil's work". They just can't resist tinkering with things, especially if the code is in a user environment. The result is that quite often something never gets finished, there's always a new version that'll be killer coming out in the near future.)(Sounds familiar?)
-
-
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 14:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
run0
Yeah, I was going to comment somewhere in this thread anyway along the lines of "Sadly for everyone, isn't poettering already working on some very noxious pseudo-replacement for sudo?"
And obviously I would much rather that distros didn't allow him to extend his tentacles even further!
(I mean, it doesn't even have a decent pun-worthy name in the traditional fashion!)
-
Saturday 7th February 2026 10:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: run0
> it doesn't even have a decent pun-worthy name in the traditional fashion
AgentP is more honest than we give him credit for - he has put the revision number right into the command name.
You are still using run0? No wonder it doesn't recognise any of the option flag names! All the cool kids are in run7.4
Now, have you got 129GB free to install the dependencies? Why so many? Well, the install script needs run6.5, where the source/destination options were swapped to make it easier, and the installer for that needs - what? You don't know why 'run' needs a source option? Ok; when it was combined with 'cat', after we moved all the file operations into that daemon...
-
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 00:19 GMT steelpillow
superpowers not superuser
the su in sudo means substitute user, not superuser. People use "superuser" to indicate the granting of root privilege, but these days sudo is more often used to confer only a limited set of magic privileges, for example to gain admin privilege for a particular service.
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 02:42 GMT doublelayer
Re: superpowers not superuser
No, it didn't, specifically the "often used to confer only a limited set of magic privileges, for example to gain admin privilege for a particular service" part. Su does less than sudo. Sometimes, all you need or want is what su does. In that case, you don't use sudo and are fine. Sometimes, you don't even need what su does so you leave out both. But if you ever want slightly more than the one feature su provides, then you look for replacements, whether that's sudo, doas, sudoRS, or something else. Pretending that the feature you want is the only feature that exists doesn't help.
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 18:58 GMT steelpillow
Re: superpowers not superuser
My wilful omission of su's capabilities is because the article and I are talking about sudo, you dull fscker!
Are you one of my prized shadow downvoters? Like many here, I have one regular clown and another occasional assistant. Frankly, when it comes to annoyance you are not in the same league as Microsoft popups. Too much inherent comedy, for a start.
[torn between FFS and Joke Alert icons]
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 20:28 GMT doublelayer
Re: superpowers not superuser
Actually, I think it is me they were accusing of not knowing what su does. Since they didn't specify what it does which I clearly don't understand, I'm none the wiser for what similarity it is supposed to have with sudo that makes it relevant. Therefore, I continue to think that it does a smaller number of things than the stuff sudo does meaning some people will want sudo because they want one or more of those.
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 18:29 GMT ChoHag
Re: superpowers not superuser
> these days sudo is more often used to confer only a limited set of magic privileges, for example to gain admin privilege for a particular service.
That was the plan but the documentation for its configuration begins with the immortal phrase "The sudoers file grammar will be described below in Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). Don't despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF; it is fairly simple" and so its contents are only ever "root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL"* so that users can type in "sudo su".
* Quick quiz, from memory only: what does each of those ALLs do?
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 09:19 GMT Kurgan
You mean systemd will gobble up and enshittificate sudo, too. Generating a ton of new issues and bugs. But you are right, it will make sudo obsolete and will solve the maintainer's issue.
After all, over time it will make all of Linux userspace obsolete, while making Linux become a total shitload of crap.
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 06:28 GMT alain williams
What fraction of Musk's $852 billion fortune ...
would be needed to support not just Todd Miller but a whole host of small people who provide Open Source tools that underpin Musk's fortune.
The same is true for Bezos, Ellison, ... could all also do so with what they find after a quick grope in their sofa but none of them will as they are just interested in shovelling money into their wallets.
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 10:05 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Musk, Bezos, Ellison… " quick grope in their sofa"
I suppose that is the essential difftence between these lucky few and we poor mortals.
Most lowly peons would prefer a quick grope on their sofa instead of blindly thrusting their grasping paws into the innards of their lounge in the vain search for small change like the apocryphally demented scotsman missing a farthing.
These are not lovely people.
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 12:00 GMT Steve Graham
Re: A reminder
The standard Ubuntu setup, inherited or copied by other distributions, is that logging in as root is disabled, but sudo grants the logged-in user root access to all commands (on submission of their own password). This is why many tutorials on system administration put "sudo" at the front of all commands.
It seems wrong, but I can't put my finger on exactly why.
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 12:24 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: A reminder
A someone who currently has a few windows open to remote systems, all sat at a # prompt after "su -" ...
If you permit root logins, or permit the use of su. then eveeryone who needs it has the root password. That's inherently insecure. For example, if one person in a team leaves (or stops needing the facility), then you have to change the password and everyone else has to get used to a new one.
If you use sudo, then they use their own password which means (for example) blocking one user from the system also blocks their root access. OK, so far, only a small step up in security.
The big thing is that once people are using sudo, then it's logged who ran what - "jbloggs ran sudo $[somethingstupid]" v.s. "root ran $[somethingstupid]". And then you can control who can do what. root login or su is a blunt tool - it's all or nothing. You can (for example) give someone permission to only manage the mail system commands and nothing else, or restart the web service and nothing else, or ...
OK, all a bit moot on a single user system - but it's a step up from every tutorial starting with "login as root" or "run 'su -'"
-
-
Monday 9th February 2026 21:57 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: A reminder
sudo is far far more than just "giving root access". It's giving access to a carefully defined set of resources - and not just to root.
Just adding a user to an admin group is just ... giving them full access to everything an admin can do. Adding them to a line in the sudo config file means you can let a user (or group of users - just add remove as required) access to specific commands. E.g. you could create a group for printer admins who have the ability to manage the print services (stop/start daemons, look at the queues) but nothing else.
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 14:32 GMT DJohnson
Re: A reminder
This, a thousand times this. I encounter FAR too many people who simply treat "sudo" as the first part of ANYTHING THEY DO on the CLI, because that's what the low-quality lazy examples do.
Equally bad is "if the command didn't work, up arrow and prepend 'sudo'". Uh, no, the command said the remote host was not found. _Read_ what is on the screen and /comprehend/ it before you blindly assign a corrective action.
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 4th February 2026 14:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Age?
Sadly nowadays, many potential youthful volunteers (in certain countries at least) are burdened with massive amounts of student debt to pay off, home purchase prices well out of reach, and (if they're "lucky") quite possibly working for those horrible 9-9-6 exploitative grasping tech overlords, meaning that spare time and energy to do some 'recreational coding' is probably quite far from their thinking as they try to keep body and mind together…
-
-
Biting the hand that feeds IT
