Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years
(millert.dev)260 points by wodniok 6 hours ago
260 points by wodniok 6 hours ago
This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility.
Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.
I don't think they even see it as their responsibility, more, "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software".
Seriously, just put a VAT on digital services to fund a system that pays out grants to individuals to help maintain open source software. It should be obvious by now that corporations will rat fuck the commons for monetary gain and there is a serious need for democratic initiatives to put technology back into the hands of the people.
Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this.
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses[1]. The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.
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
> Corporations and robots must pay.
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?
As covered literally just a few days ago (IIRC), you absolutely can demand payment: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi actively works to detect MDM, and if found, demand payment.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
Relevant articles are here
- 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
GPLv3 is a bit overreaching , especially in patent clauses. The GPL as idea is great but the license needs a little more refining
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.
That's a nice slogan, but how does it work?
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.
Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
Companies don’t step up and do things for the common good. They do things for profit. Occasionally that looks like they are charitable if the value of the PR is worth it for them.
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
I disagree on "the most critical" part. You can be superuser at all times. I understand the arguments why not; I am pointing out that this is possible. Despite people claiming aliens will arrive and nothing will work, everything works fine when the superuser account is used too.
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.
You can only fix that with leverage. The sudo maintainer doesn't have it. sudo is valuable, but if Todd stepped away, you could (and would) find other maintainers because it's so important.
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.
Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control.
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.
> A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control.
… 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.
I’d broaden that slightly to say you should try to have as few mechanisms for elevating privileges as possible: if you had tooling around sudo, dzdo, etc. for PAM, auditing, etc. I wouldn’t lightly add a third tool until you were confident that you had parity on that side.
> Why would you be running sudo in production? A production environment should usually be setup up properly with explicit roles and normal access control.
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.
I think the rise of the open-source redistributor groupie has been an interesting cultural revolution. I wonder if it will persist. Even 10 years ago, the idea of Free As In Speech dominated the idea of Free Software. Today, the greatest enthusiasm on Hacker News and Reddit is for something like Meta's Llama license (which cannot be used by people or corps with sufficient numbers of users). It certainly seems like someone out there could go out and propose the Microfree License which only applies to sufficiently non-rich people.
For my part, I want none of it. I find this reduction of a significant philosophy to some kind of base tax-and-distribute mechanism distasteful. I don't like communities were this stuff is big and they always want to run some taxation scheme where they redirect money to their own personal pet projects. It is fortunate that modern tools are good enough to build personal insulation from this stuff.
Imagine the farce of Apply HN repeated continuously. Simply awful.
“Machine Room Temperature” from Todd C. Miller’s website:
https://www.millert.dev/therm/
Server exhaust fan temperature was typically 94°F (ranged 92°F to 96°F) over the previous week and has climbed to 97°F.
Reading the release history[1]. I'm kind of shocked that sudo gets active development and monthly releases. I would have thought that something this old and venerated would have been "done" long ago.
I was wondering the same thing. I would have thought every possible combination of parameters would have been tried by now. I guess it just goes to show you that your code is never really complete.
There's also NTP.
The Largely Untold Story Of How One Guy In California Keeps The World’s Computers Running On The Right Time Zone: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-o...
> Halloween `91 with Todd as the infamous Ducktape Man!
https://www.millert.dev/images/photos/todd_ducktape_man.gif
Uhm, how did Todd relieve himself in that costume?
The funding problem is an issue.
We need to find better models. Even if it is just "low(er)" payment; that would still be better than zero or near zero payment.
Canonical tried to change that with sudo-rs, but by being Canonical they did what Canonical do best since they got too big: Read poop here
Honestly he should open a Patreon. There are loads of people that would subscribe to Sudo for $2/month or $5/month.
The problem is if I was going to do that with the open source projects I use, it is more like a penny a month * 1000 projects.
Subtract the standard ~3 cent transaction fee and he’d end up owing money instead. That seems to always be the catch with micropayment ideas.
Why? If every person participating is giving $10-$20 per month to tens or hundreds of projects and then once distributed, this equates to $x00 or $x000/project/month, why would the payment processors mind. Of course, it's all in theory.
they charge a minimum fee per transaction. from Accursed Farms' donation page (https://www.accursedfarms.com/donations/)
"Paypal keeps $0.30 + 2.9% of every donation, so please keep anything less than $0.32 as they have enough money already."
i think Cash App has the lowest fees i've seen at like $0.01 which would still be too much.
not saying it is impossible - but likely not viable directly with the current payment providers.
This is why I feel like a missing piece of Patreon/Kofi/whatever is the ability to say "Here's $x; divide it automagically amongst the creators I'm currently following"
Sure, I think a lot of those donations would amount to a few pennies or so at once, but I feel like a lot more people would be willing to support creators if they didn't have to constantly choose which to support.
I would love it if something like Github would accept donations from a repo and parcel it out to the repo's dependencies somehow. It would sadly make Github even stickier, but it would be a great feature.
wouldn't https://github.com/sponsors/sudo-project achieve the same thing in this case?
They are using github sponsors and have had some level of contributions.
I've said it before, open source works poorly in this area. It's great if everyone's getting paid fat money in a day job and can maintain their pet project a few days a month, but that's just not true for a lot of people.
It's disgusting that maintainers of critical projects have to go through the humiliation of begging for money, and absurd to suggest they all hang out Kofi or PAtreon banners. Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally. I'm baffled that some entity like the Linux Software Foundation isn't administering this already.
I wonder if a few people going beyond what is reasonable, is representative of open source projects.
For a lot of open source projects, if you have a normal day job and spend a few hours per week on a project, then the project just never gets very big. It exists, may have a few users. But on a larger scale, nobody knows it exists.
The exceptions are projects where developers spend a lot of time on the project at the expense of a day job. Though there is the possibility that they may have a hard time having a day job in the first place, which may have let to the situation with the open source project.
In general, I think we do have a culture problem where we think projects need to be successful. And people working on a project 'need' to support users (who in general don't pay).
And that expectation of free work happens throughout the open source ecosystem as well. Distributions expect projects to fix bugs for free. Open source projects expect libraries and compilers to be maintained.
Ultimately, change has to come from people who refuse to work for free. Doing something as a hobby for free is perfectly fine. As long as it stays within the scope of a hobby project.
> Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally.
Not if we don't make it easy for them. I had Claude whip up fundcli a while ago, but this post got me to finally upload it. It goes through your http://atuin.sh/ history (raw .bash_history/.*history doesn't have enough information) and generates links to projects for you to donate to.
git clone https://github.com/fragmede/fundcli
uv run src/fundcli/cli.py analyze
uv run ./src/fundcli donate --amount 100
I feel like this should have been the responsibility of investors and venture capitalists. In a normal society, the moneyed folks should give special treatment to the folks who have proven themselves to be effective givers.
Unfortunately, it seems like either the moneyed folks don't care or the current financial structure simply does not support this.
I would love to know were IBM is on this. They use sudo everywhere, even on AIX. Not to mention IBM owns Red Hat Linux.
IBM should be able to send a decent amount to Todd once in a while, but based upon how much IBM supports ssh ($0), all they are proving is they are very cheap and only wants be a parasite living off other's work.
systemd, as might be expected, has a sudo replacement in recent versions, for those who think sudo might be a bit long in the tooth: run0
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/256/run0.ht...
...although this one would have been a good fit too, of course: https://xkcd.com/149/
This xkcd is featured as the maintainer’s user icon on GitHub:
and it's also the inspiration for the logo of sudo https://www.sudo.ws/
I once wrote hacking is ethical. Maybe I meant 'eventual'. Instead of Red-Hat sponsoring sudo, china can sponsor him to put hacks in.
This is why Big Tech is so desperate for AI to work as a wholesale replacement for software developers: they do not pay for their Open Source consumption as-is, and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do.
The fact that sudo is a critical security pillar for trillions of dollars of global infrastructure but this guy gets bupkis for it screams volumes about the current state of technology.
We must do better, or it’ll be closed systems (OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle) all the way down as maintainers age out, go bankrupt, or die without succession plans in place.
Why should something like sudo not be "done" after 30 years?
Sudo is one of the poster children for creeping featuritis, to the point that the sudoers man page is a meme ("Don't despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF ...")
Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).
Different platform but the simplest mainframe utility IEFBR14, a noop process to trigger JCL events started as one instruction. Then two. Then debate started about which machine instruction should be used to set the return code to zero …
Bugfixes and security vulnerabilities, mostly. So long as fallible humans make fallible hardware running fallible software that in turn executes and/or compiles fallible code, there will always be a need for continued development of critical tooling and packages.
On a long enough timeline, those fixes become fewer and less frequent as the codebase improves, but there is no "done" in software unfortunately. Hell, entropy itself means nothing is ever done, just in an ever-changing state.
> Why should something like sudo not be "done" after 30 years?
Because new needs arise over time. For example, when I started in IT the "sudoedit" functionality was not present and so allowing someone to do "sudo vi …" would allow them breakout of the editor when it was running as root.
With sudoedit you can give people permissions to edit particular files with elevated permissions.
> Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).
They did not "give up": they found they needed only much simpler functionality shipped in the base OS. For example, sudo has functionality to talk to LDAP (which I've used at multiple jobs over the years), but is not needed for a local-only box. Once you need centralized account and privilege management, doas becomes much less useful.
> sudo has functionality to talk to LDAP
That is scary! I may need to look more at openbsd
This community and others like it are so weird in that if they see something as stable as sudo but without recent commits, rather than conclude that it's solid and doesn't need further changes, they see it as some kind of a problem and want to switch to something that's seen major changes in the last week.
Maybe that's somehow related to why so many companies are shoving AI into a bunch of stuff that doesn't need it. Gotta keep everything on the hype train. Working and fulfilling people's needs is no longer good enough.
The thing is, there is next to no software that "doesn't need further changes" at all. There is always something, sure it might be infrequent and/or most of the time nothing really big or difficult (except sometimes) but the point is: someone needs to step up and do it.
If a see a project with recent activity, best from multiple people it is a strong signal that this will happen, if the last commit is a year ago I must assume it's completely abandoned because most of the time it just is. Sometimes it's clearly communicated that it is the way because the authors see it as essentially feature complete, there are some examples of this but not that many honestly.
What are you, a dentist moonlighting as an angel investor?
Software is never "done".
The underlying APIs are always changing. The compilers and system libraries are changing.
Featuritis is a thing, but rolling it back is non-trivial as there are folks who depend upon it.
Just curious, why did you use "dentist" in your analogy over any other profession?
Similarly sudo-rs and doas-rs exist now.
I'm not sure what can be gained for further development of the OG c sudo, add security patches of course.
But fund adding yet another feature 99.9% of users will never use? I can't fathom the justification for that. Just adding attack surface at this point.
Rightly both doas and the *-rs drops ins intend to drop most of those unnecessary features.
Are you saying you would be using something that fills the same critical role as sudo even if it had not received any updates in a decade or more? Because that sounds insane
This might be a controversial view:
What if the exploitative aspect is open source itself? Trick some above average but naive developers into giving their talent, effort, insights and time away for free or very little? Maybe open source or something similar could have been organized in a way that wasn't exploitative and wasn't (possibly) unsustainable, but that is not how things ended up with what Richard Stallman and others organized.
All of this is true, but ironically Free Software is about ensuring people have control over their computers, and Open Source spun the narrative to make it about getting software cheap or without paying at all.
People having control over their computer (and even having the right to share what they run on their computer!) is completely compatible with people paying for software labor.
No it isn't. People having control over their own computer is in direct contradiction with people paying for software labor. In an honest world, sure, but in reality, people don't want to pay for shit and are going to steal from you. The Pirate Bay is still running and isn't going away. So is Anna's archive.
I think at least the license should say something like we will charge on a per CPU or whatever basis for commercial usage.
You give it away for free so don’t be surprised to get abused. Human nature working at its best and worst here.
We shouldn't let cynical greedy bastards set the terms for how the rest of society wishes to engage
There can be "cynical greedy bastards" in many places. If you optimize against them in one regard and place, will you also handle them elsewhere well? And calling for change can be abused by some of them to open new opportunities for exploitation, this time benefitting some different group of them.
You need to have an alternative, and it needs to be a credible and reliable one, to ensure that it does not end up being the case that one scam is replaced with another scam.
The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free.
There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with.
But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
This is an upfront cost and is possibly a one-time cost per-agreement.
Practically nobody downloads and installs sudo directly from the project website; people install it with their distribution of choice. The agreement could be automated and included in the licensing process. ie: the license gives specific distributions access to the software (either via paid or other agreed-upon terms appropriate to the distribution) and perhaps individual licensing terms for non-commercial entities.
Of course, the bigger ask in this decade is in use for training LLMs. OSS shouldn't be laundered through an LLM (IMHO) for license avoidance. Maybe some projects are OK with that (eg: many BSD licensed works.) There are some that likely aren't.
> The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website),
That seems like an area that's ripe for innovation. What does it take to get setup on a platform like Patreon? Seems like something similar ought to be setup for open source/independent development, probably an idealistic nonprofit.
> and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
All the organizations who really ought to pay are already setup to do all that, and do it all the time.
> But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
What we need is innovation. Maybe a license that has a trip-wire? If not enough money is voluntarily deposited into a tip jar over a certain period of time, the license requires a modest payment from all for-profit organizations of a particular size.
That's up-front, is for the most part free, and incentivizes some payment.
That's a good point. There's no good way to ensure your open source (source available?) project isn't being ripped off by some company.
Even if you add functionality to phone home, it can be removed by all but the dumbest offenders.
I think you have good arguments, but I wonder if there are alternatives that could work in at least some cases. Like, how Unreal engine's license works. Source-available to game developers, but in theory limited to paying customers, or something along those lines.
Our economic system starves you to death if you don't
People aren't vampires because they're on top, they're on top because they're vampires.
Shit flows downstream
A change in economic system might be neither sufficient nor necessary, especially if the new economic system turns out to be even worse, or a scam.
One approach is to have expectations to not only the economic system, but also other systems, and the different people involved, no matter if they're on the top, on the bottom, or somewhere in the middle.
Sounds like the system is working as intended...
Not trying to be glib here. This feels like the embrace, extend, extinguish pattern that we jokingly used to think was only Microsoft. It is now becoming more and more obviously the modus operandi of the entire enterprise software ecosystem.
I believe you are correct to be frustrated and ringing the alarm bell. This is a "death of the commons" moment for OSS.
> and new maintainers aren’t stepping up because they can’t afford rent, let alone to devote their full time to FOSS work free of charge like a lot of older project maintainers do.
What about the Rust rewrite (sudo-rs)? I think it shows people are interested in maintaining and/or modernizing tools taken for granted.
It has a more lax license AFAIK. Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes.
Edit:
To specify, new projects like sudo-rs may seem promising, but going by observation and experience with similar projects, there is no guarantee that sudo-rs and similar projects will be successful, good and continued to be maintained. The problems with old projects can end up applying to new projects as well. And projects in Rust are no exception, going by experience with existing, older Rust projects.
Aside, a pet peeve I have is that for instance Ruffle has not turned out as successful as I had hoped for, even after several years and many sponsors. The proprietary Flash runtimes written in C still outperform Ruffle greatly in some cases, causing problems for some users that want to use Ruffle instead of other runtimes.
> Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes.
This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur; the state of non-sudo-rs projects/libraries says nothing about the state of sudo-rs itself.
Not to mention that I'd imagine a similar statement would probably be true for projects and libraries written in any reasonably popular language.
If there are 1000 projects that aren't sudo-rs but are similarly load bearing, and they have all been abandoned/in so-so shape, you're right that it doesn't actually say anything about sudo-rs, but there's a highly probable outcome that will be inferred by most people. Incorrectly or otherwise.
How is this a counter argument for anything? A more permissive license is not inherently a bad thing. Many C and C++ projects are also abandon or in so-so condition, why you uniquely call out Rust makes little sense. Either sudo-rs fills the void or it doesn't, but it is a counter point to this idea that open source projects have no path of evolution. Just because that path doesn't look like how you want it to doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
By modernizing do you mean rewriting mature software in a meme language with less features than the original and introducing new bugs in the process?
The Rust smokescreen is mostly being used to slowly eradicate the GPL.
Like Lenin said, "Who stands to gain?"
Yes, I'm sure they also founded a whole foundation[0] to do that just for "attention and kudos".
I've always favored the view that digital goods are only scarce until they are released. if we had a market for patch releases once they hit some goal. Uses could tip to reach the goal. After the goal is reached the patch is released and to all. Still have free loaders but one might live on the work
So...crowdfunding via a platform like Kickstarter?
Honestly, it seems like the idealism of open source shouldn't have survived its contact with capitalism, but I suppose the contact wasn't painful enough the the exploitation continued for a long time.
Maybe we need a license that's even more onerous to corporations than the AGPL, like something with a revenue share clause.
Or maybe the problem is the naivete of software engineers. In aggregate, there was so much embrace of libertarianism that no groundwork was laid to protect ourselves from things like AI and offshoring.
Been pitching that with my FOSS colleagues and peers for years, now. A license for individual and educational use, but pay-to-play for anyone tangentially making revenue from its use. Then the conversation boils down to the business engineering of how much should something cost, with some arguing for flat yearly rates, and others arguing for cost-per-unit, while others still fret about "disrupting" the status quo immediately after acknowledging its untenability.
It's...frustrating, but those who do the work are the most qualified to explain what they need. For the rest of us, it's encouraging them to seek reasonable compensation for their work from those who exploit it for profit, and that doing so doesn't necessarily go against the spirit of open source.
can't wait for popularity-contest(1) to be mandatory and required a linked credit card.
I don't mean to come across as far too cynical, but in what world has a software license ever stopped the greedy and powerful from pillaging the IP of other people smaller and weaker than them?
In my opinion, libertarianism in software is a hollow dream that leads people to make foolish decisions that can't be protected. This makes it easy for corporations to exploit and quash any barely audible opposition.
Almost as if by plan, the libertarian mindset has eroded and weakened open source protections, defanging and declawing it every step of the way.
But today people can just vibe code their own sudo "with blackjack and hookers!"
/s
Really though, it is remarkable just how high we've built this towering house of cards on the selfless works of individuals. The geek in me immediately begins meditating on OSS funding mechanisms I've seen in the past, and what might work today. Then I remember that I don't believe it can work, but hope desperately that people like Todd can keep paying rent and continue getting some satisfaction from the efforts.
30+ years maintaining one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure on nearly every Linux and Unix system, and he's currently looking for a sponsor to fund continued development. Every company running sudo in production owes this man. Someone should fix that