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posted by hubie on Thursday September 22 2022, @11:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-what-they-crave-must-I-supply? dept.

There is no "software supply chain":

In actual supply chains, money is changing hands. A server manufacturer is paying for PCB fabrication, who is paying their suppliers for raw materials and equipment, and so on until the whole thing eventually loops back on itself when a mining company needs to buy a server.

When you take on an additional dependency in a software project, often money does not change hands. `npm install' and `cargo add' do not bill your credit card. There is no formal agreement between a maintainer and its downstream users.

There is a lot of attention on securing "software supply chains." The usual approach is that you want to try to avoid security issues in your underlying components from impacting customers of your product; and when they do, you want to be able to respond quickly to fix the issue. The people who care about this class of problem are often software companies. The class of components that are most concerning these companies are ones where unpaid hobbyist maintainers wrote something for themselves with no maintenance plan.

This is where the supply chain metaphor — and it is just that, a metaphor — breaks down. [...] Using the term "supply chain" here dehumanizes the labor involved in developing and maintaining software as a hobby.

[...] I just want to publish software that I think is neat so that other hobbyists can use and learn from it, and I otherwise want to be left the hell alone. I should be allowed to decide if something I wrote is "done". The focus on securing the "software supply chain" has made it even more likely that releasing software for others to use will just mean more work for me that I don't benefit from. I reject the idea that a concept so tenuous can be secured in the first place.

Is there such a thing as a software supply chain?

Related: Google Launches New Open Source Bug Bounty to Tackle Supply Chain Attacks


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  • (Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday September 23 2022, @12:44PM

    by RedGreen (888) on Friday September 23 2022, @12:44PM (#1273151)

    "Rather than trying to force a open source developer into higher efforts for someone else's software problem, the downstream users who are whining about these things should do some work. It's your problem. You need to solve it, not some hobbyist."

    What do some actual work rather than be the parasite corporation, you must be joking that is totally essential for their nature to be giving up. After all how can you be the victim if you actually take some responsibility for the thing that makes you money and do the vetting required to safely use it. Instead you need to be thinking of the boss who needs it done cheaply for his bonus and who will have no one to blame when the shit hits the fan with that idea, how cruel...

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