Show HN: OSS sustain guard – Sustainability signals for OSS dependencies | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OSS sustain guard – Sustainability signals for OSS dependencies

onukura.github.io

21 pointsonukura6 comments

Hi HN, I made OSS Sustain Guard.

After every high-profile OSS incident, I wonder about the packages I rely on right now. I can skim issues/PRs and activity on GitHub, but that doesn’t scale when you have tens or hundreds of dependencies. I built this to surface sustainability signals (maintainer redundancy, activity trends, funding links, etc.) and create awareness. It’s meant to start a respectful conversation, not to judge projects. These are signals, not truth; everything is inferred from public data (internal mirrors/private work won’t show up).

Quick start: pip install oss-sustain-guard export GITHUB_TOKEN=... os4g check

It uses GitHub GraphQL with local caching (no telemetry; token not uploaded/stored), and supports multiple ecosystems (Python/JS/Rust/Go/Java/etc.).

Repo: https://github.com/onukura/oss-sustain-guard

I’d love feedback on metric choices/thresholds and wording that stays respectful. If you have examples where these signals break down, please share.

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I still think metadata associated with packages (like stars, download count and more) are easy to fake and not the best metric. OpenSSF scorecard has some adoption among project maintainers but hardly any adoption in terms of making security decision based on it.

IMHO code is the source of truth. It may seem infeasible to mass analyse OSS code, but given the recent incidents (Shai-Hulud et.al) I think that’s the way forward. Personally am more bullish on SLSA or other artefact provenance technology adoption. Till that happens, metadata will be misused by attackers.

Thank you for this thoughtful critique—you're absolutely right about metadata manipulation risks.

To be clear: OSS Sustain Guard is not a security tool. I have deep respect for OpenSSF Scorecard, SLSA, and supply chain security work. That's the critical path forward.

We're solving a different problem: maintainer well-being and sustainability. Not "Is this code secure?" but "Are the humans behind it okay?" I want to surface which projects might need community support.

You're right about the limitations:

- Metadata can be gamed

- Private work is invisible

- These are proxies, not truth

Where we're complementary:

- SLSA/Scorecard: "Is this artifact secure?"

- OSS Sustain Guard: "Does the maintainer need support?"

A solo maintainer with perfect security practices can still burn out without funding. That's the conversation I want to start--not to criticize, but to encourage support.

I'd genuinely value your input: Given your expertise in supply chain security, what would you want to see from a sustainability-focused tool that would make it more useful alongside provenance technologies? Are there signals that would be harder to manipulate?

Thank you for taking the time to engage with this project. These conversations help me stay grounded and improve.

Interesting project! Though, it's usually the smaller and less known-about projects that fall victim to OSS supply-chain attacks (such as the XZ attack).

Since this is a manual check, I worry that most users will just check the big and grandiose dependencies that they have.

Who would you say are your target audience with this tool? OSS developers? Security researchers? Regular users? Corporate managers?

Thank you for the thoughtful comment! You raise an excellent point about smaller projects being overlooked.

That's actually one of the key problems this tool aims to address. While it's a manual check, the tool helps you examine ALL dependencies in your project - including those smaller, lesser-known libraries that often slip under the radar.

The dependency check option (`os4g check --show-dependencies`) is particularly valuable here: it often reveals that well-known, popular libraries actually depend on small, undermaintained projects. This visibility helps users discover these hidden but critical dependencies that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The target audience is primarily general users and developers who may not be deeply familiar with OSS sustainability issues, rather than OSS maintainers or security researchers who already understand these problems well. The goal is to raise awareness and help everyday developers understand the health status of their entire dependency tree, so they can make more informed decisions and potentially contribute back to these smaller projects that their software relies on.

Not trying to hate, but these projects come to mind:

https://scorecard.dev/

https://cloud.google.com/security/products/assured-open-sour...

Thank you for your comment!

The key difference is focus: OpenSSF Scorecard primarily evaluates security best practices (dependency updates, SAST, branch protection, etc.), while oss-sustain-guard focuses specifically on sustainability and maintenance health metrics.

For example, oss-sustain-guard checks: - How quickly maintainers respond to issues - Recent commit activity patterns - Community engagement trends - Maintainer burnout indicators

A project can have a perfect Scorecard security score but still be at risk if the sole maintainer is overwhelmed or going inactive - which is what we saw in cases like XZ or event-stream.

As for Google's Assured OSS, it's a curated list of vetted packages, which is valuable for organizations. However, oss-sustain-guard is designed to help individual developers assess ANY package in their dependency tree, including those smaller transitive dependencies that wouldn't appear on curated lists.

I see these tools as complementary rather than competing - security practices (Scorecard) + sustainability health (oss-sustain-guard) + vetted packages (Assured OSS) together give a more complete picture of dependency risk.

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