Open Source Computing

Week 6, Sept 29 and Oct 1

Continuing this week, I want an emailed weekly report from each team! Usually these would be sent to me Friday. You don't have to say much, but I want updates on project choices and other major choices. Each team should designate one person to be the "reporter" who will send the report to me.

Uh oh: https://www.koi.security/blog/postmark-mcp-npm-malicious-backdoor-email-theft

This is bad. First, the package was almost universally adopted with very high privileges. Second, the maintainer apparently decided to start doing this. No compromise, no malicious takeover, no malicious contributors. And the maintainer was well respected.

Open Source as a business

Monday: Why isn't Chrome open-source? (in android.html) Hint: widevine

Linux history

What made Linux such a successful open-source project? Why did Linux beat BSD?
The email from Linus Torvalds to Mauro Carvalho illustrates two things:
  1. Torvalds' somewhat abusive style
  2. Torvalds' firm no-regression policy: user code that used to work should never be broken by a kernel update.

How do these factors play out in the success of Linux?

A third factor is Torvalds' policy on contributions: all are welcome, but they start out as non-mainline extensions, patches or modules.

Wednesday

386BSD

LibreOffice, bash


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