Someone should make the point to these agencies [LWN.net]

Someone should make the point to these agencies

Posted Aug 9, 2026 19:01 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Someone should make the point to these agencies by koverstreet
Parent article: Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features

> 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,

If "reaching out" is not part of an an agency's charter, then yes, by definition stuff is expected to come to you instead.

> 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.

...I'm sorry, but if you're not being paid, then by definition it is a hobby, and there is no "job" to have a "description". Much less placing any obligations on you whatsoever.

You know, the whole "This software is provided as-is, with no warranty whatsoever" shtick.

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Someone should make the point to these agencies

Posted Aug 9, 2026 22:32 UTC (Sun) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link]

> ...I'm sorry, but if you're not being paid, then by definition it is a hobby, and there is no "job" to have a "description". Much less placing any obligations on you whatsoever.
>
> You know, the whole "This software is provided as-is, with no warranty whatsoever" shtick.

I'm certainly not going to do any boring work without being paid. If any user (actually, companies) are affected by policies and want me to teach them about those, and possibly centralize knowledge about known regulations of our software, I'm certainly open to consulting work, and of course, to being well paid for it.

And if intelligence agencies are affected by our software releases and they don't voluntarily come to us, they'll have to do more work, so it's in their interest to come to us and talk. If they don't, I don't give a ****. I'll keep having fun of having broken the (bad) scripts of an intelligence agency with a release.