OSS Maintainer Out-Suffers a Masochist in 'Fame & Riches' Comic
Description
A 'Patch Friday' (© 2024) webcomic titled 'OSS Fame & Riches' on a pale green background. On the left stands a man in a black BDSM gimp mask and chest harness, skin dotted with burn marks, saying: 'I let people put out cigarettes on my naked skin.' On the right, an ordinary developer in a red t-shirt replies with a long monologue: 'I spend decades of my free time maintaining a project used by thousands of codebases without ever getting paid or recognized for my effort. The only way my name becomes known is if a malicious actor infiltrates my project to insert a backdoor, in which case the whole world crashes down on me.' The masochist responds: 'You should get some help.' The comic riffs on the xz-utils backdoor saga and the broader plight of unpaid open-source maintainers, framing OSS maintenance as a form of suffering so extreme even a professional masochist is concerned
Comments
3Comment deleted
OSS maintenance: the only hobby where the safe word is 'CVE'
The labor is volunteer; the blast radius is enterprise-grade.
... or when malicious actors include your handy utility into their rootkit, so everyone starts thinking that your utility is malware and should be blocked by all anti-virus and anti-spam software with extreme prejudice. Comment deleted