Who’s Paying to Fix Open Source Software?

The Log4Shell exploit “exposes how a vulnerability in a seemingly simple bit of infrastructure code can threaten the security of banks, tech companies, governments, and pretty much any other kind of organization,” writes VentureBeat. But the incident also raises some questions:
Should large deep-pocketed companies besides Google, which always seems to be heavily involved in such matters, be doing more to support the cause with people and resources?

Long-time Slashdot reader frank_adrian314159 shares a related article from a programming author on Dev.To, who’d read hot takes like “Open source needs to grow the hell up.” and “Open source’ is broken”.

[T]he log4j developers had this massive security issue dumped in their laps, with the expectation that they were supposed to fix it. How did that happen? How did a group of smart, hard-working people get roped into a thankless, high-pressure situation with absolutely no upside for themselves…?

It is this communal mythology I want to talk about, this great open source brainwashing that makes maintainers feel like they need to go above and beyond publishing source code under an open source license — that they need to manage and grow a community, accept contributions, fix issues, follow vulnerability disclosure best practices, and many other things…
In reality what is happening, is that open source maintainers are effectively unpaid outsourcing teams for giant corporations.

The log4j exploit was first reported by an engineer at Alibaba — a corporation with a market capitalization of $348 billion — so the article wonders what would happen if log4j’s team had sent back a bill for the time they’d spend fixing the bug.

Some additional opinions (via the “This Week in Programming” column):

PuTTY maintainer Andrew Ducker: “The internet (and many large companies) are dependent on software maintained by people in their spare time, for free. This may not be sustainable.”
Filippo Valsorda, a Go team member at Google: “The role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession… The status quo is unsustainable…. GitHub Sponsors and Patreon are a nice way to show gratitude, but they are an extremely unserious compensation structure.”
Valsorda hopes to eventually see “a whole career path with an onramp for junior maintainers, including training, like a real profession.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump’s Social Media Site Quietly Admits It’s Based On Mastodon

mrflash818 shares a report from PCMag: To avoid a lawsuit, Donald Trump’s social media site is quietly acknowledging the computer code powering the platform comes from Mastodon. Trump’s “Truth Social” site now features a dedicated section labeled “open source,” which contains a Zip archive to Mastodon’s source code. “Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That’s why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not ‘Big Tech,'” the site adds. Truth Social created the section on Nov. 12, two weeks after social networking provider Mastodon threatened to sue Trump’s platform for violating its open-source license.

Since Mastodon is an open-source software project, anyone can use it for free. But if you do, the software license demands the code and any ensuing modifications to your Mastodon-powered platform be made publicly available, allowing the entire Mastodon community to benefit. (This doesn’t include publishing any user data or disclosing admin access, though.) […] However, it appears the uploaded Zip archive is simply a barebones version of the existing Mastodon source code you can already find on GitHub. The archive itself is only a mere 30MB in size. Nevertheless, Rochko said the Zip archive might “become more interesting” once Truth Social finally launches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.