Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.
But that's how the higher-ups at places like IBM and Oracle see the world.
And these people are free to roam the streets unfettered. Hardly seems right.
It’s not perfect, but it is already something that is being done.
I wonder if sudo would be better off joining one of those open source foundations instead of staying solo. It's too small to justify a meaningful amount of contribution to these companies, at which point the bureaucratic overhead of dealing with it probably kills the motivation
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra?
The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder.
Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department?
What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.
The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?
Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/i-started-identifying-corporate-...
The post-open source space is indeed a very exciting space in 2026
> this is like saying “what do you mean post-modernist architecture, architecture predates modernism”.
https://lobste.rs/s/kaftkn/i_started_identifying_corporate_d...
If someone expects to be paid for the use of their software, releasing it as open source is not what they want.
If a maintainer of a software project starts trying to demand payment or threatening to change license terms, it’s a reasonable response for a company to fork it or build their own solution.
In terms of housing and speaking only from personal experience, European brand of social democracy seems to get it.
The constant fear of lawyers that using some GPL lib will infest entire codebase of their project with GPL is a real problem that stops many corporations from contributing in the first place.
It's copyright law which should go away.
We agree that that was its initial stated intention.
However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").
But now we don't live in the age of scarcity of content. On the contrary, content creators are competing for a possibility to get into consumers' attention span and push their agenda (ads). Everything has changed.
Removing all copyright restriction will not decrease the amount of content available for a person through their lifetime even a few percent.
This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.
Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.
rms is the Marx of the 20th Century. GPL is freedom from corporate oppression.
Due to the nature of software, especially in the 80s, it existed in both text and binary form, which made it easy to perverse the nature of selling software from selling code to selling binaries, and big companies went even further in their collusion with the government socialists by making even re-selling even your own binaries illegal.
GPL is just trying to fight this madness with its own weapon. The GPL is an attempt to go back to capitalism of small business owners and individual service providers.
Of course, you can always say that America is exceptional, and she will have "Marxism with American characteristics", just like China switched from true socialism to "socialism with Chinese characteristics", but would still recommend avoiding the word which associates with GULAG and mass starvation.
From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].
[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
After all, people in these companies don't work for free and are able to spend a lot of money for other services.
Greenpeace is a (non-profit) corporation. Unions are corporations. Municipalities. Colleges and universities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
Should they have to pay?
With that logic why should non profits have to pay for anything at all?
Then again, you usual Friday outing of FANG engineers may have more money than some nonprofits too.
From time to time, I would reflect on the fact that Microsoft and other commercial suppliers were getting paid for providing services to us, but I was expected to work for free.
If you want to fix it, you need organizational heft comparable to the companies using it, and the ability & willingness to make freeriding a more painful experience.
Also, I disagree that every company needs to pay the man. Funding is important, yes, but a *nix system is not crippled without sudo. You can change the permission systems. The superuser can do so too. It is not black magic. The permission system is trivial. sudo is simply a feature of convenience, not a "if sudo does not exist, nothing works" - that just makes no sense.
No one[1] changes what product they are using based on funding or not of open source software. Companies will step in and fund it if they want control, like with Rust, or if the maintainer finally stops giving them free labor and they actually need the software.
[1] not enough people to alter finances
Core tools like sudo have survived things like this before
Isn't it done and finished, after 30 years of development?
I encourage you to peek at their changelog (https://www.sudo.ws/releases/changelog/) for more insight into why this project is still under active development.
It's really not.
I know of at least one recruiter who does something like this and specializes in greybeard hiring, and it seems like a steady niche if you have the network to pull it off.
Sudo is kind of a UX tool for user sessions where the user fundamentally can do things that require admin/root privileges but they don't trust themselves not to fat finger things so we add some friction. That friction is not really a security layer, it's a UX layer against fat fingering.
I know there is more to sudo if you really go deep on it, but the above is what 99+% of users are doing with it. If you're using sudo as a sort of framework for building setuid-like tooling, then this does not apply to you.
… and sudo is a common tool for doing that so you can do things like say members of this group can restart a specific service or trigger a task as a service user without otherwise giving them root.
Yes, there are many other ways to accomplish that goal but it seems odd to criticize a tool being used for its original purpose.
It's roughly the same complexity (one drop-in file) to implement.
There's a place for true superusers, such as auditing, where no stone should be too heavy. But mostly for securing systems, we want RBAC, and sudo is abused as a pile-driver where only a mallet was needed. Polkit is more of a proper policy toolkit.
And doing cross-role actions may be part of that production environment.
You could configure an ACME client to run as a service account to talk to an ACME server (like Let's Encrypt), write the nonce files in /var/www, and then the resulting new certificate in /etc/certs. But you still need to restart (or at least reload) the web/IMAP/SMTP server to pick up the updated certs.
But do you want the ACME client to run as the same service user as the web server? You can add sudo so that the ACME service account can tell the web service account/web server to do a reload.
There is no need for the acme client and web server to run as the same user. For reloads the certbot user can be given permission to just invoke the reload command / signal directly. There does not need to be sudo in between them.