Seems like the real story here is one guy maintaining a critical infrastructure begging for volunteers to help out and nobody steps up. So yeah, I really don’t like what he does. And also the OSS community is failing him.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one day it comes out that these harassment campaigns against crucial FOSS infrastructure/chokepoint maintainers were funded by Thiel.
Remember the XZ hack a few years ago? That whole mess started with a targeted harassment campaign towards the project’s lone maintainer. Eventually the sock puppet accounts wore him down and he was convinced to bring on a second maintainer to help with the project… who also turned out to be a sock puppet and who introduced the critical backdoor into XZ.
A lot of research has been done into this event since it happened, and the current consensus seems to be that both the harassment campaign and the malware creation were done on behalf of the Russian government.
So we’re now in the era where FOSS maintainers have become the targets of literal nation-states.
Seems like the real story here is one guy maintaining a critical infrastructure begging for volunteers to help out and nobody steps up. So yeah, I really don’t like what he does. And also the OSS community is failing him.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one day it comes out that these harassment campaigns against crucial FOSS infrastructure/chokepoint maintainers were funded by Thiel.
Think bigger.
Remember the XZ hack a few years ago? That whole mess started with a targeted harassment campaign towards the project’s lone maintainer. Eventually the sock puppet accounts wore him down and he was convinced to bring on a second maintainer to help with the project… who also turned out to be a sock puppet and who introduced the critical backdoor into XZ.
A lot of research has been done into this event since it happened, and the current consensus seems to be that both the harassment campaign and the malware creation were done on behalf of the Russian government.
So we’re now in the era where FOSS maintainers have become the targets of literal nation-states.
Thiel didn’t make the guy use the tool of the enemy
That was my take on it. It isn’t the only case.