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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.
“Maintainers of last resort”, my [back].
Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source
> Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source
On this I agree. This seems indeed just promo advertising to white-wash these companies. They don't really care about ethics in open source.
Many of the names on the list makes the initiative rather suspect. Companies who do a lot to undermine free and open-source software, who hide critical software behind their walls, preventing both its scrutiny and its adaptation and improvement, and two of the LLM giants - they'll "defend open source"? I don't know about that.
> Akrites gives critical infrastructure stakeholders a confidential, structured place to coordinate vulnerability discovery, remediation, and disclosure across the open source projects they depend on
So, a bunch of large corporations - some of who are known to be in bed with the US government - will share vulnerabilities among themselves, out of the public eye? Fishy.
All they're really missing is Oracle and Bambu Lab.
If it's sent to Akrites, they can even pretend it's done responsibly – even though only megacorps get a seat around that table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
A charitable foundation might be plausible to help companies secure their closed for-profit software but it doesn’t really have the same urgency for the fabric of the internet (or the same moral clarity)
Closed software still has many people with access to the code. Governments or researchers have been given access to lots of critical source code. It can also be leaked. I wonder whether attackers are going to be more willing to bribe people with access to source now they have better odds of finding vulnerabilities with limited effort.
But in the examples cited (and really any other large closed piece of code of any significance in this era) it also has owners with money, and they should be compelled to fix their own stuff.
Or open the source code to be fixed, I guess ;-)
Yet still important to be secured due to the impact vulnerabilities can have. And LLMs can work without source code access via utilizing things like debug symbols, disassembly, reverse engineering, etc.
>paid maintainers
Just like open source maintainers their time is already being spent on other things which they see as more important over making the project 100% security bug free. Just because they are being paid, that doesn't make security their number 1 priority.
Well perhaps the companies who employ them to make that software they sell for profit should let them do that first rather than tokenmaxxing, and the great big non-profit effort can get round to them to help a little bit later after it has helped secure all the open-source stuff the internet actually runs on.
Still not addressed the moral clarity point being brought up, nor the ramifications of the Linux Foundation choosing which closed source projects to focus on and alienating their mission statement.
Again, your idea is noble but why should the Linux Foundation be saddled with it when those other options exist? OSS needs their focus as their mission outlines.
Ambitious and interesting. I wonder how long this will last and on whose dime and time? Akrites employs no engineers, so who will make the fixes and who'll pay them?