this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Pretty bad is also that it intersects with another problem: Bus factor.
Having just one person as maintainer of a library is pretty bad. All it takes is one accident and no one knows how to maintain it.
So, you're encouraged to add more maintainers to your project.
But yeah, who do you add, if it's a security-critical project? Unless you happen to have a friend that wants to get in on it, you're basically always picking a stranger.
i can't see how paying someone would have changed anything in this scenario.
this seems to be a long running campaign to get someone into a position where they could introduce malicious code. the only thing different would have been that the bad actor would have been paid by someone.
this is not to say, that people working on foss should not be paid. if anything we need more people actively reviewing code and release artifacts even if they are not a contributor or maintainer of a piece of software.
I think you’ve answered your own question there
no, the solution is not to pay someone to have someone to blame if shit happens.
there are a bus load of people involved on the way from a git repo to actuall stuff running on a machine and everyone in that chain is responsible to have an eye on what stuff they are building/packaging/installing/running and if something seems off, it's their responsibility to investigate and communicate with each other.
attacks like this will not be solved by paying someone to read source code, because the code in the repo might not be what is going to run on a machine or might look absolutely fine in a vacuum or will be altered by some other part in the chain. and even if you have dedicated code readers, you cant be sure that they are not compromised or that their findings will reach the people running/packaging/depending on the software.
Of course you can’t be sure anyone involved, paid or not, isn’t compromised. But if you want more human effort put into a project, people need a reason to do so. Complaining that volunteer contributors don’t spend enough of their time and effort with no compensation isn’t going to solve anything. Maybe AI tools will make that work more available in the near future.
If my job didn't pay me, I would have certainly burned out years ago. For one, I'd need another job.