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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • He has a legit point that Steve did not give LTT a chance to comment. “He doesn’t have to!” Maybe. But he gave the other side a ton of airtime/chances to comment. It was very one sided and while GN made some good points, it felt like a hit piece. And Linux, imo rightfully, felt a little betrayed by a guy he’d worked with in the community.

    His reaction wasn’t great but it was that of a guy who was defending his team and from someone he’d probably consider a ‘friend’ impugning his integrity and dragging them without giving them any opportunity to comment or even letting him know it was coming–two very common practices/norms.

    A unflattering view of GN vid is that he felt threatened by LTT labs entering the space and he wanted to get out in front of that an expose"how unreliable" they are. He didn’t give LTT a heads up or allow them to comment because he knew they’d have a solid response. He blindsided him on purpose.

    All that said, GN did Linus a favor. It accelerated his transition away from CEO and forced them to review their dumb production rates and the videos that are coming out now are better than ever.

    Ironically, it left a sour taste in my mouth about Steve and I haven’t watched any of his videos since.



  • Linus got phished out of his twitter account recently.

    Respect where it’s due. He owned it and was transparent so everyone can learn. Apparently he was at a pool party and just about to throw the burgers on the grill when he got an email that said his account was logged into from Turkey or Russia or someplace.

    He panicked a bit, because of the last time his YouTube account was hacked he felt like acting quickly was the only thing that help it not be worse. I think he clicked the link in the email and “logged in” and boom. Got em.

    Caught him at the right time and place and it all aligned to burn him.










  • It depends on the software and situation of course, but if you are paying a contractor to develop/write a solution for you aka “government built” then the contractor that writes the code owns 0 of that code. It’s as if it was written by Uncle Sam himself.

    Now, if the government buys software (licenses), the companies will retain ownership of their code. So if Uncle Sam bought Service Now licenses, the US doesn’t “own” service now. If service now extended capability to support the govt, the US still doesn’t own the license or that code in most cases.

    Sometimes the government will even pay for a company to extend its software and that company can then sell that feature elsewhere. The government doesn’t get any benefit beyond the capability they paid for–ie they don’t own that code. That can work to the governments benefit though, because it can be used as a price negotiation point. “we know you can sell this feature to 50 different agencies if you develop it for us, so we only want to pay 25% of what you priced it at”.

    But like it said, if it’s a development contract and the contractors build an app for the government, all of the contracts I’ve ever seen, have Uncle Sam owning it all. The govt could open source it if they wanted and the contractor would have no say.

    That’s what we call GOTS products https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_off-the-shelf#:~:text=Government off-the-shelf (,for%20which%20it%20is%20created.

    Vs COTS:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_off-the-shelf

    With COTS, that’s where you’d see the ownership (depending on the contract/license agreement of course) remain with the vendor.







  • It highlighted some pretty glaring weaknesses in OSS as well. Over worked maintainers, unvetted contributers, etc etc.

    The XZ thing seems like we got “lucky” more than anything. But that type of attack may have been successful already or in progress elsewhere. It’s not like people are auditing every line of every open source tool/library. It takes really talented devs and researchers to truly audit code.

    I mean, I certainly couldn’t do it for anything semi advanced, super clever, or obfuscated the way the XZ thing was.

    But I agree, that the fact we could audit it at all is a plus. The flip side is: an unvetted bad actor was able to publish these changes because of the nature of open source. I’m not saying bad actors can’t weasel their way into Microsoft, but that’s a much higher bar in terms of vetting.