Someone should make the point to these agencies
Someone should make the point to these agencies
Posted Aug 9, 2026 17:08 UTC (Sun) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296)In reply to: Someone should make the point to these agencies by kleptog
Parent article: Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features
Are you sure they never do?
If they don't, then they're being lazy idiots. No matter what your job is, you can't expect everything to come to you, you have to seek things out sometimes, and if you're promulgating regulations on specific software packages without ever reaching out to say "hey, this is us at X, this is what we're doing and why, this is how to contact us", then that's sheer lazyness.
> ISTM that were doing an ok job. Sure, it might be nice if F/OSS was a bit more organised rather than relying on the goodwill of various tech groups/businesses/etc to represent them. But I think we're doing as well as can be expected given the type of people that that do F/OSS.
That sounds like a cop out :)
If you're the expert at something, part of your job is education so that knowledge doesn't die with you. F/OSS isn't a hobby underground thing anymore, we build and maintain the infrastructure the world runs on, so part of our job description is now education - if not ourselves personally, getting organized enough so that it happens.
And I personally avoid the word organization, because that calls to mind meetings and committees - i.e. places where work doesn't get done. It's more about recognizing good ideas and getting the ball rolling so it becomes something we as the OSS community culturally recognize as something worth doing.
You can do a lot with just the right sort of encouraging conversations here and there, and making stuff visible that you were doing already by making your notes presentable and public.
A big part of my job right now is just the documentation and test infrastructure version of this. I'm not spending a ton of time writing new bcachefs code right now, a lot of it has been documentation and test infrastructure and working with people in those areas so that hopefully someday it can just be the default expectation that those parts of the project, and people will pitch in and help out because they see me doing it instead of seeing it as shit work that no one else wants to do. And it seems to be working pretty well; point is, this job isn't just about writing code, and leaving stuff to the organizations you mentioned often results in stuff not getting done or getting done badly. There's just a lot that goes into having a functioning ecosystem.