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Comment by Denvercoder9 | Hacker News Reader

> Like, meeting someone at several dev conferences should be a requirement at the very least.

This is utterly and completely unfeasible. Most open source maintainers, especially those that are struggling and are pressured to hand-off maintenance, don't have the time, means and will to travel to meet up with prospective co-maintainers, not just once but multiple times.

In practice it would just result in projects getting abandoned, the prospective co-maintainer starting a fork, and everyone switching to use the fork.

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Intelligence agencies mastered fooling people about their bona fides in person a long time ago. Meeting someone in person will stop casual individuals who just want to crash the project for the lols or some other personal-level reason, but it would have been barely a bump in the road for this clearly-nation-state-level attack.

It adds another layer of complexity, though, and when someone trips up (and eventually, they will), it lets us know who is doing what and why. It also adds another layer of expense and vulnerability. Part of the beauty of cyberattacks for intelligence agencies is that they are very light on tradecraft. This helps to reduce that advantage.

We actually know who poisoned Alexander Litvinenko and what they're up to today, for example.[0]

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35370621

You could probably get about 80% of the job done with just 20% of the work. I’m not in OSS but I hire technical people remotely, and I know many people that do. Some consultant friends have caught blatant scams within the first couple of rounds of interviews on Zoom.

Interviewing is a different situation though, because you start having essentially no relationship with the interviewee, and you haven't seen their work. OSS projects don't just add everyone that asks as a co-maintainer. Usually it's someone that has contributed to the project for a while already, and through that has shown they understand the code, are capable of improving it, and can make sensible decisions about the road to take.

Yea, I get that, from what I see in the details of this case the contributor was very competent. What I'm questioning here is whether in OSS projects there is enough face-to-face communication, probing about values, etc.

>I’m not in OSS but I hire technical people remotely, [...] interviews on Zoom.

Different situations with different incentives and psychology:

- potential to receive money : job candidates are willing to get on Zoom calls or meet in person because they want a paycheck.

- no money involved & volunteer for free : potential open source contributors are not interested in getting on Zoom calls for $0 pay.

That's when you dangle a grant in front of them.

Also, while I'm not a lawyer, and in general the bar is very high to criminally prosecute an employee for doing "a bad job," I wouldn't be surprised if there are major jurisdictions where intentionally backdooring your employer's code could land you in prison.

I don't think it's crazy for a maintainer to Google the person a bit, and if there is no positive match, ask the other person for at least a little bit of detail about themselves, like where they live (country/city), who they work for, etc. Maybe hop on a phone call or something.

In this case, Jia Tan just doesn't seem to match any real person we can find online. It's not like there's an elaborate online persona that they have really built.

While I don't want to put Lasse Collin on trial since he's a victim too, I do think he owes the community an update and explanation of what went down. It's not because we want to point fingers at him, but to learn from the experience.

Really, it starts before things get bad. This thing where - in the famous XKCD example - a single guy is thanklessly maintaining a project for 20 years in Nebraska needs to stop. Software libraries like these are no longer a one-person job. They can't be for the bus factor alone. Major projects like Linux distros or bigger foundations like Apache or Mozilla need to start harping on people hard to contribute to important libraries. We'll get to whatever the buzzword of the day is once we do the important work first.

Find a way to make it happen. Sorry, "I just can't" isn't going to cut it after this.

I agree we need to stop depending on the 20-year hobby project of the guy in Nebraska, but adding barriers (which requiring travel and in-person meetings is) to sharing the load is not the solution. What these projects need is the necessary resources (mostly money) for multiple people to work on it professionally.

What I don't understand is, where are all the code and security contributions from Big N and other multi-billion-dollar international scale and users? Do they all have their own internal fork of every major library? If not, you would think that they would be their own financial interest to keep somebody on payroll to maintain fundamental libraries like this.

Is the argument that well known software should be taken over by professionals? There are many motivated software maintainers, including single guys in Nebraska, who have better operational security than well funded companies.

Remember the recent incident with the signing keys at Microsoft? Or the one before that? And these are the biggest, most well funded, companies on Earth we are talking about.

Organizations such as Let's Encrypt work well because they are staffed with motivated and competent people, not because they are well funded. This is not a problem that can be solved with funding alone.

I think this is a really important point. Every commercial contract I've been involved in has clauses that are intended to mitigate supplier risk, eg that they go out of business, and the contracts people do due diligence on suppliers to vet that they are who they say, try to eliminate the one-person operations, and generally mitigate risk if they really need the code but the only supplier is a tiny startup.

Perhaps large corpos need to apply their standard risk mitigation lens to their supply chain. Their stack or their security depends on these 390 packages. 27 of them have less than 3 maintainers. Recommendation: find alternatives.

> bigger foundations like Apache or Mozilla

What bigger foundations? Apache foundation has yearly revenue $2.1 million. Why do you think they reacted as they reacted to log4j? There are no resources.

Open source is running on fumes.

pretty much this.

That's why for whatever anyone thinks of Theo's antics, I appreciated the OpenSSL/LibreSSL Valhalla blogs and overall effort to do something about it.

TBH I'm amazed in it's current state that Apache took in Pekko(FKA JVM Akka...), part of me is guessing it's because some of their other infra is dependent on it...

Foundation based OSS is on fumes. Open core... I am still hopeful for on many levels.

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