Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).
I cannot for the life of me find what you’re referencing. I only remember the
sqlite/etilqsfiasco with McAfee.https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
https://bagder.github.io/emails/ has the email collection.
Thanks for sharing these gems. I can almost feel the exasperation in some of the emails and their replies.
Thank you!! I knew I must have been missing something.
Here’s an example from NASA
https://x.com/bagder/status/1379897937141063686?lang=en
I feel a bit split about this. Seems it is an actual law, and it kind of makes sense. You probably don’t want random components from unknown people and places in your multi million dollar space equipment. But it feels rather arrogant to just demand such things.
Is NASA actually a customer? Did they pay for a license to use curl (genuine question - I’m not familiar enough with it to know if enterprises and organisations require a paid license)? Are they planning on becoming a paying customer? Do they make donations to the project? If not, it feels kind of rude to send a demand letter to the lead developer of a free piece of software straight up demanding a formal letter stating where the free software is being developed and maintained (for free), or if outside the USA, that the free software has been tested in the USA. Oh, and a bonus demand that such information be returned within 5 business days (naturally with an implied “or else”, just to really make sure those pesky people maintaining open source software for free really get the memo)
In any case, why don’t all their scary 3 letter spy agencies go and figure it out on behalf of NASA themselves? It’s open source, they could just like, read the source, test the source, and audit the source themselves. Or fork it and make any modifications they’d like to ensure its safety
I don’t blame the person sending the emails, obviously, they’re just following orders, but the whole email reads as very entitled and arrogant, assuming NASA don’t provide any compensation to the project and projects maintainers for their use of curl
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/12/17/curl-supports-nasa/
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/07/closing-the-nasa-loop/
Their process for validating software doesn’t have a box for “open source”, and basically assumes it’s either purchased, or contracted. So someone in risk assessment just gets a list of software libraries and goes down it checking that they have the required forms.
As the referenced talk mentions, the people using the software understand that all the testing and everything is entirely on them, and that sending these messages is bothersome and unfair, and they’re working on it. Unfortunately, NASA is also a massive government bureaucracy and so process changes are slow, at best.
The TLAs don’t generally help NASA, and getting them involved would unfortunately only result in more messages being sent.
As for contributions, I think that turns into an even worse can of worms, since generally software developed by or for the US government isn’t just open source, but public domain. I think you’d end up with a big mess of licensing horror if you tried to get money or official relationships involved. It’s why sqlite is public domain, since it was developed at the behest of the US.
Mostly just context for what you said. NASA isn’t being arrogant, they’re being gigantic. Doing their due diligence in-house while another branch goes down a checklist, sees they don’t have a form and pops of an email and embarrassing the hell out of the first group.
The time limit thing is weird, but it’s a common practice in bureaucracies, public or private. You stick a timeline on the request to convey your level of urgency and the establish some manner of timeline for the other person to work with. Read the line again, but extremely literally: “we have a time frame of 5 days for a response”. “Our audit timeline guessed that it would take a business week for you to reply, so if you take longer we’re behind schedule”. The threatening version is “your response is required on or before five business days from the date of this message”.
The presumption is that the person on the other end is also working through a task queue that they don’t have much personal investment in, and is generally good natured, so you’re telling them “I don’t expect you to jump on this immediately, but wherever you can find a moment to reply this week would keep anyone from bothering me, and me from needing to send another email or trying to find a phone number”
curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can’t even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.
That’s not remotely true, but it is nevertheless outstanding work and very much deserving of recognition and support.