I keep brooding on the way the xz backdoor was enabled in significant part via weaponizing the FOSS culture of shitty behavior and abuse.
Yes, there're other pathologies at work here (the big tech capitalist pillaging of the commons, etc).
But what is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, & that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.
@Mer__edith seems pretty off base to call that FOSS culture. In my 30 years of working in FOSS, the people who are actually immersed in FOSS are much nicer and more helpful than in general. It is the people who treat FOSS contributors of any kind as some kind of service provider that are the shitty ones. Way back, I worked in corp tech support, and got treated shitty. So often, I see people laying on that kind of crap on volunteer FOSS devs on the internet. That is not FOSS culture.
@eighthave eh, I mean...read the long thread of comments and you'll see many people who disagree. A shitty culture in general isn't erased by a subset of kind people operating within that culture.
@Mer__edith Try to find the stressed out, overworked dev who implemented some piece of macOS or Google that annoys you. You can't, they are hidden within the corp. That doesn't mean they aren't an asshole, it just means you can't interact with them. FOSS devs are vastly more likely to operate in public and respond to feedback from anyone. So there is a data bias at work here.
@eighthave @Mer__edith I won't go into detail, but this threat (and some bits on Pedagogy I read earlier) helped me understand a part of society a lot better.
A honest "thank you" to the both of you!
Also this is my favorite piece of prove that social media can help us all to thrive and... Mature