If you were a rollercoaster engineer, and you saw that a rollercoaster had an unsafe design, would you follow a similar approach? "I'm not going to ride that, but I'll let this line of people ride it without warning them." Obviously the stakes are wildly different, but still...
Granted, no one died over Heartbleed but it caused lots of real people harm. We should start worrying about the well being of our fellow human beings long before their lives are at stake.
The linked article specifically mentions that a specific soundness issue had been found and a fix had been submitted as well. If they had done nothing, it would have attracted no comment. If they had allowed another maintainer to review and merge, it would have attracted no comment. But they went out of their way to denigrate the people who called attention to this issue, called the issue "boring", rejected the patch, then deleted the issue and all comments.
> Every time I stumble upon shitty open source code, am I supposed to fix it?
Your tone suggests that you don't want any part of this, so you continue along that path. I'm not going to convince you to start caring about your fellow men and women.
This is an unfair characterization of what happened. Here's another version: The maintainer did not denigrate anyone, he did call the patch "boring" (which isn't really an insult or anything?), worked on his own patch (without closing the previous PR mind you). People immediately starting shitting on the maintainer - within the hour - because the PR had not been merged. Maintainer chose to delete the issue to avoid it devolving into the usual mess. More shitting contest happened here on HN, on Reddit, and elsewhere.
To me, deleting the issue instead of disabling comments or making read-only suggests mens rea on the maintainer that their actions were out of line and regrettable, and don't suggest an effort to de-escalate the situation.
True, but I (and I think the other comments) referred to the top level comment here, which is a guy who just felt the code was smelly and avoided it, without having discovered anything specific.
> Your tone suggests that you don't want any part of this, so you continue along that path.
Been there, done that. The amount of excuses and other bullshit is not worth my time and effort. If the project is on github I still do open issues providing repro or at least a stack trace if possible. But if you have your own bug tracker where I'd need to sign up first (most likely going through email verification) you've lost me. Same for when you start requesting I do a git bisect even though I provided steps to reproduce or start giving excuses for why this isn't an actual bug and I'm holding it wrong. I'll just stop replying immediately.
It's also a matter of degree and thoroughness. There's a huge difference between "I've found a specific exploitable vulnerability in this security library and here is a proof-of-concept exploit", and "after a cursory look, I see this rust code uses a lot of `unsafe` and I'm uncomfortable with that".
This point pretty much invalidates your argument. When making a moral decision like this, determining the stakes and the consequences of remaining silent is a critical part of the moral evaluation.
In the case of the rollercoaster, silence could have deadly consequences for the riders. Not so much for the code. (Sure it's possible that someone might use it in a life-critical situation, and it could fail in a way that would cause loss of life, but assuming from the outset that this is a strong possibility is quite the stretch.)
Failures of a roller-coaster are “non-ergotic”; individuals never experience the long-term average failure rate, since they’re, you know, dead...
This has got to be the most common and tragic type of mis-application of statistics I’m aware of; I know I used to do it all the time! Virtually nobody teaches/talks about it, but it is arguably more critical to understand than “causation vs. correlation”, or “post hoc ergo propter hoc”.