Re: Dishonest Forks? | Was - Re: [Namedroppers-honest] Brian Smith asks: Who is Dean Anderson?

Dean Anderson wrote:

  Actually, it seems that no responsible system administrator would place
  trust in anonymous and unaccountable system software. Most people agree
  that would be grounds for being fired unless the admin was very junior.

I know I can type something like

  grep '^Copyright' /usr/share/doc/*/copyright

That doesn't mean that I have the time or inclination to track
down every single author and judge their contribution to my daily
work experience.  The people who support the distribution I use
push out updates (ordinary bug fixes and security fixes) to me
periodically.  I apply them without stopping to inspect every
single change.  It's always possible that someone somewhere
subverted a software package before it was pushed out to
millions of users.

I've met just three or four authors of the software I use on my
desktops or servers.  I've interacted with perhaps a couple dozen
more online.  From a practical perspective, almost all the system
software I use is from an anonymous source.

When it is imperative that I understand the changes (for example,
updates to the tiny bits of code I've written and placed online),
I give little or no weight to figuring out who sent me the
updates or fixes.  All I care about is whether the changes are
correct.

Your fixation with the source of some of the djbdns patches is
unusual.  Isn't it enough for you to deconstruct the patches
themselves, and pinpoint the problems?  No one I know has been
able to follow your technical arguments on the list.  Perhaps
you could post that on a webpage.


Faried.
-- 
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