Programming

Following publication, Miller has been in touch to tell us that he has no plans to abandon sudo, or even hand it off, but he suspects change is still on the horizon for the essential tool.

"While I don't expect to maintain sudo for an additional 30 years, I also don't currently have someone to pass the torch to," Miller told us. He noted that the xz utils backdoor has made him hesitant to hand it off to someone he doesn't know, and that he "feels responsible for sudo" after having spent so long as its lead dev and maintainer.

Unfortunately, a lack of financial backing means sudo work has ground to a glacial pace.

"Since I have limited time I've mostly been focused on fixing bugs and cleaning up the code base rather than adding new features," Miller said. "As a result the amount of time I spend is heavily influenced by the bug reports I receive."

Funding or not, Miller expects sudo-rs to become the next generation of the tool in coming years.

"Ubuntu is already shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo command in their latest versions," Miller told us. "I've been in contact with the people working on sudo-rs since the project started and I trust them to do right by the sudo user base."

Regardless of what happens, Miller agrees the sudo situation he's in is yet another example of how open-source maintainers is putting the entire computing community in a bind.

"Without some form of assistance it is untenable," Miller said. "Maintainer burn-out is real."

imagine if he said fuck it and turned sudo into a crypto mining malware

It’s been 12 years since Heartbleed and we’ve had numerous ”lone maintainer” issues since then. The situation shouldn’t come as a surprise or be especially ”hard to believe”.

This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.

Unless the creators manage to roll some kind of ”commercial” version, it’s not very sustainable in the long run. Turns out many eyes don’t really equal many PRs

That Ubuntu unity article where the maintainer was a 10 year old when he started the project but now has shit to do is pretty funny.

Isn't the whole point of FOSS software that anyone can fork it?

Excuse me, but how isn't this a core feature, or do I think too complicated?

Funding or not, Miller expects sudo-rs to become the next generation of the tool in coming years.

"Ubuntu is already shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo command in their latest versions," Miller told us. "I've been in contact with the people working on sudo-rs since the project started and I trust them to do right by the sudo user base."

Projects don't last forever, and when they inevitably end, it's an opportunity to switch to something newer and hopefully better. Sudo coming to an end, if it does, will just force people onto alternatives.

Being open source, sudo will always exist, whether someone else wants to maintain it, fork it, use it as-is, or just reference it. It's because it's open source that it can serve a purpose even beyond its EOL.

Anyway, sudo's not dead yet, so there's still plenty of time for people to look at what's out there. Some distros have already moved to, or are considering moving to, alternatives like sudo-rs, so I'd expect that to continue.

It reminds me somehow on the famous xkcd webcomic: https://xkcd.com/2347

Edit for an addition: Maybe it's also a reminder that we should frequently donate when we use FOSS.

https://git.sudo.ws/sudo

According to the above Robert Manner and AZero13 also have one contribution each. There's also the https://opencollective.com/sudo-project which has a board.

If Todd wants to pass off the project he has all the resources to do this.