2021 essay on who owns open-source security failures
Original title: The Gift of It's Your Problem Now (2021)
The 2021 post uses an unnamed Java library emergency to argue maintainers inherited users' risk by keeping a bad idea compatible.
A 2021 essay republished on Lobsters reflects on a worldwide rush to patch a widely deployed open-source Java library after a security flaw. It does not name the library. The author argues the failure came from preserving backward compatibility with a bad idea, then rejects claims that the incident proves open source, pay, or capitalism failed. The rest is a long argument about free software, responsibility, and authoritarianism.
Unconfirmed: The library, the flaw, and the claim that roughly 40% of deployments were updated are the author's account, not a named advisory.
- The essay says about 40% of deployments needed a hurried update.
- It says maintainers shipped a fix quickly after the flaw was found.
- The library and the vulnerability are not named in the post.
From the original article
12 min read at apenwarr.caRecently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hundreds of millions of worldwide deployments of this library needed to be updated in a hurry. (The other 60% also needed to be updated in a hurry, but won't be until they facilitate some ransomware, which is pretty normal for these situations.)
By apenwarr.ca via JamieTanna · apenwarr.ca
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