this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.

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[–] HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not gonna lie, kinda blame systemd for this. The more utilities they swallow the more funding gets concentrated to the RedHat folks, and the less freedom you have to choose different software. They've certainly made some improvements in specific utilities, but there is an invisible cost of centralization

[–] nykula@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It doesn't seem any money that the sudo developer had received was redirected to systemd, even though systemd has its own sudo called run0, with interesting features such as limiting the amount of memory or CPU a command it runs can use. His employer supported sudo as his side project while he was employed to work on something else. The funding from big tech is instead going to the Rust rewrite, sudo-rs and other projects of its community.

[–] HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 week ago

I didn't mean they were directly responsible for him losing the sponsorship, just that it has made it harder to find new ones.

If my memory serves this isn't the first time systemd has moved into a space and the existing infrastructure has withered away. Vaguely thinking udev or logind, but its not so much a critique as a worry. I've played with OpenRc, RunIt, and Upstart over the years, and I want them to remain viable alternatives

About run0, isn't it also not a setuid binary?

Iirc sudo-rs was still setuid…