All JSON is valid YAML, so after you’ve converted the file to JSON, just… save it with a YAML file extension and call it a day…?

You keep arguing that open source projects are strict with their code base reviews

Go ahead and quote the words I said that suggest this. You have a talent for claiming that people have said things they have never actually said.

The only claims I’ve made in this conversation are:

1. The open source ecosystem does NOT strictly rely on confidence in individual project maintainers because audits and remedial measures are always possible, and done more often than most people are aware of. Of course this could and should be done more often. And maybe it would if we didn’t have so many non-contributing freeloaders in the community.
2. Most of the widely used open source projects are not being done by hobbyists or volunteers but rather by professionals who are getting paid for their work, either via a salary or by commission as independent contractors.
3. You don’t seem to have a firm grasp on how open source software is actually developed and managed in general.

Nothing about the portion of the sentence you highlight actually implies that they haven’t already been getting paid to do open source work. That’s an interpretation that you’re projecting onto the sentence because it fits your narrative. The poster never identified themself to be a volunteer. I’ve already reframed the sentence for you in a previous post, but I’ll try one more time: “Whenever any tech company is willing to pay me to do work related to my open source project, I sit down with them and talk about my rates” is a semantically equivalent sentence to what the poster said.

You’re also taking one single datapoint which has ambiguous credibility to begin with and extrapolating it to characterize a massive industry that you, like countless others, benefit from while hardly knowing anything about how the sausage gets made.

I’d be surprised if you’ve ever offered a substantive contribution to an open source project in your life, so I won’t be losing any sleep if a freeloader loses confidence in the ecosystem. But realistically you’ll be using open source software for the rest of your life because the reality is that closed source software really can’t compete in terms of scale, impact, and accessibility. If you actually care about the quality and security of the things you depend on, then do something about it. And prattling ignorance on social media does not count as doing something.

Your interpretation is simply not supported by the literal words being said by the person. “we can sit down and talk about my rates” implies that this person already has rates that they charge for the labor they do.

You’re projecting a meaning into the person’s words that simply aren’t there because you want it to fit a narrative that has is not commensurate with reality.

You brought up your credentials earlier so now I’ll bring up mine: My full time job, which I get paid a very competitive salary for, is to develop exclusively open source software. I have many collaborators in the industry, both at my same organization and from others (some non profits, some academic labs, some government agencies, but mostly private for-profit organizations) who contribute to open source projects either full time or part time.

I don’t have one single collaborator who is the mythical unreliable open source volunteer you’re talking about. Every single person I’ve worked with has a commercial or professional (i.e. academic, mission-driven) interest in the developmental health of open source software. When we decide what dependencies we use, we rule out anything that looks like a pet project or something with amateur maintenance because we know if the maintainer slacks off or goes rogue then that’s going to be our problem.

The xz case is especially pernicious. This is a person who by all initial appearances was a respected professional doing respectable work. He/they (perhaps there was a team involved) went to great lengths to quietly infiltrate the ecosystem. I guarantee someone could do the same thing at a private company, but admittedly they’re less likely to have as broad of an impact as they can by targeting the open source ecosystem.

I really wish you would just stop trying to defend Linux and open source development, and listen to the concept/opinion I’m actually stating

I am listening, and I’m telling you that you’re wildly misunderstanding the nature of the open source industry. You, like many many other software developers, are ignorant about the vast bulk of widely used open source software gets developed.

The key sentence in the post you linked which constituted more than 50% of the words being stated by the poster and yet you somehow conveniently missed which completely negates the whole narrative that you’re trying to promote:

Speaking as an open source maintainer, if a tech company would like to pay me to do ~anything for my open source project, we can sit down and talk about my rates.

Which means this person is NOT simply a volunteer as you insinuated here:

When someone suggested a level of effort to be put on code checked in to prevent security issues from happening, the maintainer pushed back, stating that they will decide what level of effort they’ll put in, because they’re doing the work on a volunteer basis.

but in fact is available to be paid a fair rate for the labor they perform. In fact your entire description of the post is mischaracterizing what is being said in the post.

I don’t know how you could have accidentally missed or misinterpreted one of the two sentences being said by the poster, and the longer of the two sentences at that. It was also the first sentence in the poster’s statement. It seems more likely to me that you missed that on purpose rather than by accident. Maybe you’re just so eager to find evidence to match your narrative that your brain registered the entire point of the post incorrectly. Allow me to reframe what’s being said to simplify the matter:

As a self-employed contractor, if you demand that I perform free labor for you, I will decline that request.

Now just add a much more frustrated tone to the above and you get the post you linked.

You’re either intentionally misrepresenting the post or you failed to understand them correctly. I’ll let you take your pick for which is less embarrassing for you.

And my rebuttal is three-fold:

1. Security does not depend entirely on the maintainer, and there is recourse even in the worst case scenario of an uncooperative or malicious maintainer.

2. The maintainer you quoted said he would be open to complying with requests if the requesters were willing to provide monetary support. You are intentionally misrepresenting their position.

3. The alternative of closed source software doesn’t actually protect you from security issues, it just makes it impossible for any users to know if the software has been compromised. For all you know, a closed source software product could be using one of the hypothetical compromised open source software project that you’re so afraid of, and you would never actually know.

If you’re willing to pay a license for a private corporation’s closed source software so you get the pleasure of never being able to know your security posture, then why would you be unwilling to financially support open source developers so they have the resources they need to have the level of security that you’d like from them?

That link doesn’t prove whatever you think it’s proving.

The open source ecosystem does not rely (exclusively) on project maintainers to ensure security. Security audits are also done by major enterprise-grade distribution providers like Red Hat Enterprise. There are other stakeholders in the community as well who have a vested interest in security, including users in military, government, finance, health care, and academic research, who will periodically audit open source code that they’re using.

When those organizations do their audits, they will typically report issues they find through appropriate channels which may include maintainers, distributors, and the MITRE Corporation, depending on the nature of the issue. Then remedial actions will be taken that depend on the details of the situation.

In the worst case scenario if an issue exists in an open source project that has an unresponsive or unhelpful maintainer (which I assume is what you were suggesting by providing that link), then there are several possible courses of action:

• Distribution providers will roll back the package to an earlier compatible version that doesn’t have the vulnerability if possible
• Someone will fork the project and patch the fix (if the license allows), and distribution providers will switch to the fork
• In the worst case scenario if neither of the above are possible, distribution providers will purge the vulnerable package from their distributions along with any packages that transitively depend on it (this is almost never necessary except as a short-term measure, and even then is extremely rare)

The point being, the ecosystem is NOT strictly relying on the cooperation of package maintainers to ensure security. It’s certainly helpful and makes everything go much smoother for everyone if they do cooperate, but the vulnerability can still be identified and remedied even if they don’t cooperate.

As for the original link, I think the correct takeaway from that is: If you have a vested or commercial interest in ensuring that the open source packages you use are secure from day zero, then you should really consider ways to support the open source projects you depend on, either through monetary contributions or through reviews and code contributions.

And if there’s something you don’t like about that arrangement, then please consider paying for licenses on closed-source software which will provide you with the very reassuring “security by sticking your head in the sand”, because absolutely no one outside the corporation has any opportunity to audit the security of the software that you’re using.

Your credentials don’t fix the logical fallacy.

You’re making a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent where you’re assuming that just because the backdoor was caught under these particular conditions, these are the only conditions under which it would’ve been caught.

Suppose the bad actor had not been sloppy; it would still be entirely possible that the backdoor gets identified and fixed during a security audit performed by an enterprise grade Linux distribution.

In this case it was caught especially early because the bad actor did not cover their tracks very well, but now that that has occurred, it cannot necessarily be proven one way or the other whether the backdoor would have been caught by other means.

The fact that it was discovered early due to bad actor sloppiness does not imply that it could not have also been caught prior to wide spread usage via security audits that take place for many enterprise grade Linux distributions.