The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth | Hacker News Reader

The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth

technologyreview.com

13 pointsp4bl09 comments

Unmasking FOSS contributors and extending the reach of control over a critical software like Linux, for their own good and possibly the detriment of those they whimsically decide are enemies.

This is terrible news, and yet another wake-up call to how FOSS, its integrity, and our access to it must be safeguarded.

How many people anonymously contribute to the kernel? Or any other core infrastructure, for that matter? I think that those days are long behind us. FOSS is mostly just a commons between corporations now.

The Kernel doesn't accept _anonymous_ contributions for legal reasons. I'm sure there are a handful of pseudonymous contributors but, as you said, there aren't likely to be many.

Looks like they'll do everything they possibly can to inspect the code and not submit any security patches.

The article barely cares about that in the article. It's obsessed with unmasking identities of open source contributors.

Where does it say that they're unmasking contributors?

Is rhetoric like "an ocean of contributors whose identities and motivation are often obscure, making it hard to hold them accountable.", "Experts are worried that blind spots about the people who run open-source software make the whole edifice ripe for potential manipulation and attacks.", and "The government is only just realizing that our critical infrastructure is running code that could be literally being written by sanctioned entities. Right now.” not honest enough from a group with military funding?

None of that says that they're trying to unmask people. That could also be editorializing by the article author. That could also mean, in a literal sense, that they just want to quantify how many people are unknown quantities, and what code they're contributing. You can make the logical leap to unmasking, but it is still a leap.

Interesting quote from the end of this article:

> “Even when you look at proprietary software, a recent study showed it’s actually 70% or more open source.”

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