They haven’t particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it’s happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc.
(The sceptical tone isn’t because of disbelief of Collin, it’s because we don’t know enough about the situation to be able to say Collin is or isn’t telling the truth here.)
Don’t be too hard on Collin. Looking back on the threads it’s fairly clear he’s been the victim of a social engineering attack on an overworked maintainer. People were pressuring him to hand over maintainership while expressing disappointment at the slow pace of development. The off-list contact by Jia must have seemed like a helpful enthusiastic solution to a burnt out developer.
People were pressuring him to hand over maintainership while expressing disappointment at the slow pace of development.
Very likely that was part of the attack as well.
Definitely sounds like it. This happened to me in a real company as well. It was butal.
Sorry to hear your situation. I’ve heard a similar story from a friend, where cronies bully one “colleague” after another to push that poor person to the edge. These morons climb the company’s career ladder in that way, hacking the HR evaluation. It’s truly disgusting.
I agree with that assessment, I’m not accusing Collin of anything. If it is what it seems to be then I feel very bad for him. Just being cautious with wording until things are more settled/until we know more is all.
Poor guy. My heart breaks for him. I hope people are understanding, compassionate, empathetic, and aren’t hateful and harrassing towards him about it, but, realistically… they likely will be hateful and harrass the poor dude, because some people are just sucky, entitled, and rude little jackasses (and I hate it so much and I don’t understand why people behave this way!) I hope he can find a way to handle it all okay. :(
I think if you read through this and take it at face value, there is a pretty clear picture of what happened: https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2024/03/30/a-microcosm-of-the-interactions-in-open-source-projects/
”Finding a co-maintainer or passing the projects completely to someone else has been in my mind a long time but it’s not a trivial thing to do. For example, someone would need to have the skills, time, and enough long-term interest specifically for this.” - https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00571.html
As someone who runs a charity almost completely solo because of a lack of volunteers, I feel this so much in my bones. It’s one thing to say, “Hey folks, I can’t run this on my own, I need help” but it’s another to find people who actually have the level of skill, committent, passion and integrity to contribute in a meaningful way. I can get people putting their hands up but I’ve lost count of the number of people who have then turned around and said, “Oh, actually I realise now I don’t have time for this” or start in great and then just ghost me. It also takes more of my own time and energy, on top of what I’m already doing’ to onboard and train people and it sucks so hard when I do that and then people disappear shortly after - I constantly have to question whether the time it takes to do that will be worth it vs just continuing the struggle by myself.
When you get consumers being arrogant and demanding, getting angry at you for taking too long to respond to their messages or not work fast enough… it’s soul crushing. Way too many people take volunteer work for granted or assume you’re getting paid for your time and can therefore treat you like a working-class pleb or are plain just fucking rude and entitled. :( APPRECIATE YOUR VOLUNTEERS FOLKS! We need more volunteers, and appreciation. Many hands makes light work.
Hell… As a researcher maintaining one technology on my own, I feel this. This is another reason one shouldn’t do things for free. There needs to be an incentive. And professionalism in the community. Sadly, both are hard to find…
Actually being paid is one of the biggest reasons for a lack in volunteers (the other is people working more than they used to). So many volunteers have been replaced with paid workers. Many charities aren’t volunteer run organisations anymore but run more like not-for-profit businesses. As a result it’s harder to get funding and donations. And people are less interested in volunteering unless they can be paid for it.
It’s a vicious cycle and I’m watching more and more local, community organisations get eaten up by massive, centralised non-profits; and more and more local volunteer organisatns struggling to get off the ground. 😞
Damn. The amount of unpaid work for something so crucial to todays communication is staggering. I always make sure to pass parts if the donations I receive (not a lot) upstream.
I have the horrible feeling that very few people who use FOSS software and could actually donate some money at least dont do this. Do we have any numbers for this?
I am starting to believe that we shouldn’t rely on this type of labor product in the first place. Something as critical as OpenSSH should be (and possibly is) funded by the users and also NOT use third party libs because it’s dangerous, as this incidence showed. FOSS is free not as in beer.
I‘m not sure what you‘re suggesting. Every piece of FOSS software is made by someone and the a lot of it builds on top of some upstream thing. Otherwise everyone would have to rebuild from scratch and FOSS would break down. Or am I missing your point?
Also, you cant make every 16 yr old user pay for a foss product. Companies must be made to pay for foss and downstream teams must be made to send parts of their income upstream, no matter if they make enough.
Good luck with that.
Commercial and closed source software is no safer, and may even be using the same foss third-party libs under the hood that you’re trying to avoid. Just because foss licences generally require you to disclose you’re using them, it doesn’t mean that’s what actually happens.
And even if, by some miracle, they have a unique codebase - how secure is that? Even if an attacker can’t reach the source, they can still locate exploits and develop successful attacks against it.
At its core, all software relies upon trust. I don’t know the answer to this, and we’ll be here again soon enough.
That’s a heartbreaking read, and I can’t imagine how it feels now to know that someone who finally helped lighten the load may be involved with such an egregious breach of trust and safety.
I think this is why I can’t get behind Linus-style takedowns, even if the prospective maintainer has made bad a mistake. Entitled consumers make things hard enough already with direct access to the developers, they don’t need any help getting burned out.
Nothing so far seems to indicate Lasse Collin knew what was going on.
I feel sorry for him. Must suck working on an open source project for free and then get sucked into something nefarious like this. He must be under tremendous stress.
Just a reminder - I’m sure we have all seen it: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I hadn’t seen that particular one before, so thanks! I guess I was one of the lucky 10,000.
Thanks for commenting. I’m going to keep posting these.
The lucky 10000 is such a wonderful concept.
Archived version : https://web.archive.org/web/20240330134018/https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/
