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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.

Title		There is No “Software Supply Chain”
Date		Thursday September 22 2022, @11:04PM
Author		hubie
Topic
from the for-what-they-crave-must-I-supply? dept.

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