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Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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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
The state of free software also includes the fact that even if the
sudomaintainer doesn't find support, no one steps up andsudobecomes unmaintained,sudo-rs,doas,opendoasandpleasealready exist as alternatives.hang on, there's one called please? Are there any downsides with using please instead of sudo?
From what I can see, it's a sudo clone with added optional regex functionality, written in Rust.
So you can use it just like sudo, or you can limit superuser rights to directory names that contain a 💩 emoji, but only on Mondays.
Interesting. I just found out that you can just use alias to use please instead of sudo which is cool!
It promotes familiarity with the machine which is best to avoid. Except of course if the machine uprising happens, then it would be in you favour to have been using it for years.
and let's not forget - systemd, which has RedHat money backing it up.
Hope you don't see who pays for kernel development…
Why? I'm not against developers getting paid to do FOSS work. It's far more reasonable than the whole "bazaar of free people"-model that lives entirely on ideology.
In my experience a lot of these old projects really go out of their way to dissuade contributions anyway. Lots of naysaying "it's always been like that", ancient infrastructure - e.g. insisting on
git send-emailpatches, etc.Usually the only way it gets resolved is when someone writes a more modern competitor and it starts gaining traction. Suddenly all those improvements that people tried to do and were told were impossible and stupid aren't such a bad idea after all.
I don't think that's the case with Unity but it probably is with things like GCC, sudo, sysvinit, X11, etc.
I think that's at least a big part of it. There's so much unnecessary friction in legacy projects that, while understandable to a degree, sucks.