Commit 77a294d
Update maintainer and author info. The other maintainer suddenly disappeared.
Lmao, that’s putting it lightly.
the other maintainer now has a special place:
Special author: Jia Tan was a co-maintainer in 2022-2024. He and the team behind him inserted a backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) into XZ Utils 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 releases. He suddenly disappeared when this was discovered.
RIP Jia Tan
I don’t think they would be in much peace. It was years of their work that was ruined by a person with OCD and valgrind.
I like how the first point made is that the backdoor violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines, as if that’s the main problem
I wonder if he has a donation page. We need to get him some money.
I agree we should support him, but you know who should be more concerned with giving him and other open source maintainers money? The billion dollar corporations that rely on these critical projects and use them absolutely for free. Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google, Siemens, Motorola, God knows how many more.
But when open source projects go dual license to try and get paid people lose their minds.
This!!!
This!!
People, stop celebrating “freeing” software of maintainers that want to prevent being exploited.
Seriously. If you’re not a business why do you care?
How many of these dual license solutions have donated to xz maintenance?
They wouldn’t have to if xz had a dual license.
But none of these for profit companies that are dependent upon xz have funneled any of their gains in there?
Because that’s
a badnot even a solution.What about a license that would require every company with a market cap above 25 B that (indirectly) uses the software to contribute X amount (like $1000 a year) of revenue back?
I think if that caught on then companies would call it undue burden to sift through all the dependencies they use to make such small payments.
It is a difficult problem. But on the face of it your suggestion seems very reasonable.
Maybe that force them to just donate to every dependency, probably cheaper on their level. And better for project.
If dual licensing was standard the software that uses things like xz would pay down the line so everything was funded.
GitHub has a tool built-in to show all dependencies, it’s not that hard to write a little script to check the
LICENSEfiles in the repositories. I’m sure one of the biggest companies in the world has the ability to do that.One of the biggest companies in the world used Copilot to give its users code scraped from GitHub projects without telling them it came from GitHub and that it’s under various licenses that need to be followed.
I mean this is already a thing to certain degrees right? Virtualization platforms I use both are free for personal use, but not business use, or at least certain feature package use isn’t permitted. What’s the difference? Putting the software under a different license/eula?
Yes, but the proposed license would also be free for businesses except for the largest in the world.
We need more non profits who can set aside funds for these projects. It not like these companies don’t want to help its just jot entirely clear how they can help.
They can help by donating some of their billions.
Sure. But if the project in question only has one or two donation methods and none of those are supported by the company, then the company can’t easily donate anything. Companies usually have a strict way of how they can donate and it usually entails Paypal or some other costly solution, while projects like that likely just has a patreon or LibrePay option and perhaps a crypto wallet. Most companies can’t work with that.
He probably needs a comaintainer. We could select one of us and then try pressuring him into accepting that.
Stop right there, Jio Tan! The same trick doesn’t work twice.
I wrote to ask him but I never heard back. To be fair he’s probably quite stressed at the moment.
Can someone provide a summary on what this means? I thought there were malicious exploits in this. Why is it back up and the perpetrator unbanned?
Lasse Collin is not the perpetrator, that would be “Jia Tan”.
Lasse is the original maintainer of XZ, they have been placed back in their position as sole maintainer.
“Jia Tan” was the person who slipped the backdoor into XZ and is now banned.
Lasse has already fixed abd removed the backdoor.
XZ itself is critical software everyone uses (its one of the main compression/decompression programs used on linux)
Yes but damage seems to be done. Distros are talking or have moved off of it to zstd.
There are some, probably. But any exodus will be slow. Xz isn’t useless because it was dangerous once.
Besides, XZ isn’t the only project in such a danger. Banning doesn’t solve that problem. They need to put in more funding and eyes.
Zstd and xz fullfil different needs. Xz take more time to compress and is faster to decompress as far as I know.
I would argue this might make xz safer mid-term. So much eyes on it. I’m not familiar with other solutions, but who’s to say the bad actor won’t try a similar trick elsewhere
Exploits were removed. Maintainer who committed them still banned. xz is a critical piece of software.
The second maintainer was most likely the culprit.
There’s a Wikipedia article regarding this incident. Have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
Don’t downvote people asking questions.
Usually, yes, I am a bit tempted here though.
It’s just a question. Any implications or tone you perceive here is likely your own projection.
Try and read it assuming the poster is asking in good faith.
This sounds just like something Jia Tan might say…
