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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The GNU project is wall-to-wall toxic waste, but I note for the record that I don't think sudo is a GNU program and IIRC it's not even GPL.

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Three decades of free software that generated billions upon billions of revenue and a big part of existing infrastructure is built upon is far from "wall to wall toxic waste".

I'm not a fanboy for the sake of it, but you're being a little over your head here.

Online Linux services are so powerful, that they can even ban the president of the united states of america.

Even in the literal sense revenue does not imply the absence of toxic waste. Indeed, historically speaking, revenue has been strongly associated with toxic waste.

I don't mind expressing this opinion. There is nothing anywhere in the GNU project which should be emulated, except the license.

How is it possible that GNU’s `sudo` is not GPL?

Unless it’s BSD, I guess?

It's not GNU's `sudo`, it's under an ISC-style license, and is maintained by an OpenBSD developer, so it's closer to "BSD's sudo" (though OpenBSD has been shipping `doas` instead for a little while now).

sudo even predates GNU by several years.

wow, I never realized sudo is from 1980[0]! I thought it was a product of the late '90s. It's actually incredible it has managed to stay around this long.

[0] https://www.sudo.ws/history.html

Pffft, `sed` is from 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed

And `ed` dates from 1969: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

ah, yes, but those _felt_ as old as dirt.

On the other side, I remember howtos/manuals/READMEs in the early '00s referring to su(1) and only sometimes saying "..these days you should be using sudo(8)", so it always felt like something "new" :)

There is no such thing as GNU sudo.

The homepage for sudo is https://www.sudo.ws/

It is licensed under an ISC style license.

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