Back

https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

I have begun a post explaining this situation in a more detailed writeup. This is updating in realtime, and there is a lot still missing.

Holy shit.

@eb I really hope that this causes an industry-wide reckoning with the common practice of letting your entire goddamn product rest on the shoulders of one overworked person having a slow mental health crisis without financially or operationally supporting them whatsoever. I want everyone who has an open source dependency to read this message https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00567.html

@glyph @eb I'm frustrated that big tech's efforts to increase core library security are "your project is too popular, you must use 2FA" and "the best reverse engineers in the world will find your bugs and put you on a 90 day disclosure deadline" and not "here is $100K/year and benefits to keep doing what you're doing at your own pace."

@geofft @glyph @eb I'm certainly not disputing that it's a real problem that that doesn't happen more often, but isn't there some precedent for big tech companies hiring people to work on specific open source projects? So it's not totally unheard of

@diazona @geofft @glyph @eb there’s a lot of precedent for hiring maintainers of top-level programs whose brand (for lack of a better term) has reached the level of awareness of a C-level with a hiring budget. Collectively pooling money to help the projects C-levels have never heard of… has a much weaker track record. We’ve been trying to tackle it at Tidelift for a while and suffice to say I’ve definitely had a lot of “but it can’t happen to me” conversations.

@luis_in_brief @diazona @glyph @eb Yeah that resonates with my experience. People like GvR get hired (which is great!) but there's a whole dependency stack underneath. Their maintainers often have a strong résumé to get hired for a normal big tech job at a company that uses the language/ecosystem/etc. but not necessarily for maintaining the project as their job. Sometimes the job is even "build something similar for an internal non-OSS ecosystem."