Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown | Hacker News Reader

Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown

github.blog

209 pointswoodruffw143 comments

If everyone starts applying cooldowns, won't it postpone the problem? So now there is a considerable amount of users who are affected and someone from the affected group discovers the infection and reports it.

But if everyone will be delaying updates, won't be there less chances to catch it in time? I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.

I think the idea is that it gives a bit of time for the companies which run automated scans of new versions to run through and detect any issues with new versions before users install them en-mass.

The goal is to give time for automated scanners ran by cybersecurity companies to flag malware before it gets installed on real users.

Only a few of the recent supply chain attacks were discovered by users noticing weird behavior.

The majority were noticed by maintainers or third party groups noticing things like releases not tied to a source tag, many rapid releases, etc.

Cooldowns won’t stop everything, but it makes a malicious release significantly more likely to be noticed

>If everyone starts applying cooldowns, won't it postpone the problem?

There are still research firms who are actively and aggressively scanning new packages once they are pushed. For example socket.dev pulls new packages across ecosystems and performs automated analysis and runs it in a sandbox. We don't have to have them go boom in someone's production repos to find out there is a problem.

Also as an upstream, if your "coworker" releases a strange package without discussing the changes with the broader maintenance group, you might notice after 3-48 hours, but probably not within the hour unless you happened to be online.

And if every malware developer worth their salt now introduces code to "wait out" that period of time, we're back to square one.

This assumes that they employ clandestine enough techniques that you have to actually install, wait and observe the behavior for longer than the cooldown period in order to detect this, because the code is "obfuscated" enough to evade static analysis of the code. It's anti-virus / anti-anti-virus 101 all over so to speak.

The good thing I suppose is that it raises the bar. Your regular "virus generator" script kid (sorry: supply chain attack generator script kid) can no longer pull this off.

Fundamentally, this is a cat-and-mouse game. But I suspect that "time bomb" techniques aren't economically viable for attackers, at least not with current patterns: current attackers demonstrate "smash and grab" tendencies because they know their access is limited anyways. Attempting to wait out a cooldown exposes them to additional detection risk.

Of course, maybe the attacker profile changes over time. But that's the nature of the game.

Most automated analysis isn't dependent on just behavior, but rather suspicious things in the code itself. You have a popular open source package with files that exist on pypi but not github then that's a big flag, or if a similar package suddenly has some base64encoded garbage that runs through an obfuscated exec call. In other words the simple fact that the project has obfuscated code is enough to flag for further attention.

That said if the only issue is time, researchers will just run their automated analysis through machines with dates in the future alongside their normal tests.

Cat and mouse like the sibling says ;) Like if you start changing system time, I'll keep a log of system time to detect any "jumps" and then "behave normally" if I detect this. Of course I'll run the code that does this through "my obfuscator".

The thing with cat and mouse based on time is that this now became a default. I rather liked my odds when malware authors assumed that the defaults were that dependabot updates right away. If the general consensus online seems to be 7 days, then I'll set my dependabot to wait 10 days, so on average I'll catch even things people report over a weekend. Now that the default is a longer time period, I have to change my time period to be even longer, which actually increases my risk in another way: I'll stay vulnerable to _actual_ vulnerabilities vs. supply chain attacks for longer.

ok, but your package still contains obfuscated code that we can read

> I'll keep a log of system time to detect any "jumps" and then "behave normally" if I detect this.

This makes no sense, the system clock would be set before the suspect package is even pulled down. There isn't a "jump" just a reboot and system start at a "totally real" point in time.

And the premise is that this package can evade detection of its suspect code by using an ever-increasing amount of odd code? Yeah, that's a hard strategy.

A cat and mouse game at least raises the bar for the exploit. The status quo requires no attempt at obfuscation at all. It also makes it harder for such an exploit to turn into a worm, since developers have time to notice their credentials have been stolen and pull any malicious packages pushed using them. (and such worms hitting popular packages have so far been how most people have been exposed to this risk).

A package I maintain once ended up in exactly this state because of a sync script.

This would increase the malware surface area and make it much easier for automated security scanners to detect. So win-win for everyone.

You can simulate accelerated time in the sandbox used to evaluate the runtime behavior of the package being analyzed.

> And if every malware developer worth their salt now introduces code to "wait out" that period of time, we're back to square one.

Of course this is an arms race, but the time setting inside the sandbox doesn't need to be the same as outside.

That's a fair enough thing to say but then also setting the default to 7 days is no longer a necessity, because security researchers can automate running a new version through an accelerated time sandbox, can't they?

And no they can't and is probably why this change is happening to dependabot: A common pattern is sampling time before and after a sleep/timer, then aborting/delaying if the sandbox looks like it accelerated time by having a 1s sleep timer expire after 0.1s. Malware would also try to use different time sources and try to correlate them.

And yeah, like you say as well, of course its an arms race in the same way that back in the day state of the art viruses and worms were and anti-virus software was.

And personally I still liked it more when malware/supply chain attack actors assumed everyone was upgrading within a day or two while I was doing it after 7. You don't have to outrun the lion, just the guy slower than you and who's between you and the lion ;)

If it is about a few highly specialized firms finding the vulns we should let them do it before publication and we do not need cooldowns.

If it is not about that and we still subscribe to Linus's law then cooldowns will just postpone the problem.

Publishing publicly then applying cooldowns in projects is much easier tgan establishing a new standard for pre-release security testing versions that works across ecosystems and gains zooling support.

Exactly this. The firms can follow the standard practices of the industry without needing to injection further process into the projects.

Releasing secure software is the right thing to do. We only release insecure software because we need the eyeballs to make it secure.

If we believe the point made above that the many eyeballs are not that important then releasing before we have done everything to make the software as secure as possible is irresponsible.

"We only release insecure software because we need the eyeballs to make it secure." No one is doing this on purpose, they believe the software to be secure when they release it... You shouldn't gate the release of a package until every single offsec research shop in the world has had a chance to look at it

The cooldowns effectively make the initial push into the package repository into a pre-publishing step. It's pretty much isomorphic with what you're suggesting.

Easy, then you just delay your project’s dependency updates just a little more than everyone else

The cooldowns should probably be randomised.

> But if everyone will be delaying updates, won't be there less chances to catch it in time?

No: the security assumption behind cooldowns rests on security scanning parties, not on innocent users being victimized. Three days is a short cooldown, but it should be a good enough lead for scanning parties.

> I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.

It’s not that much data, particularly for parties that are directly financially incentivized to be the first to report malware.

Do you have an example of those things you're alleging?

All package malware related news I see are related to users being affected by it (then security firms do their analysis whatever) ...

Analysis and detection are not the same.

If you google “supply chain security company” you will find various companies of various reputations vying for attention in this space.

Didn't find any. Found a lot scammers, though.

Just post one link of a "supply chain" problem that was prevented by any of these companies before it went into the wild and affected users.

Simple.

I generally try not to name the companies directly, because I don’t want to give them free advertising. But you can look up e.g. the recent Shai Hulud campaign.

> Just post one link of a "supply chain" problem that was prevented by any of these companies before it went into the wild and affected users.

This is not the claim being made, since cooldowns are not widely adopted at the moment.

I see. So, it has never happened before.

Well, yeah. There’s no package police that’ll stop you from installing malware. The argument has never revolved around that; the argument is solely that cooldowns are effective if you use them, and timely detection by third parties is strong evidence of that.

>and timely detection by third parties is strong evidence of that

Do you have an example of those things you're alleging?

I gave Shai Hulud as an example above. If you want precise timeline examples that demonstrate the efficacy of cooldowns, here’s some examples I collected last year[1].

(See the “Window of opportunity” column in the table.)

[1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...

Most of the malicious ones just curl something in a postinstall script, scanners already catch that. The sneaky ones don't look malicious until they run, and three days may not help.

Every single one now will be more sneaky, and we’ll be operating on a 3-day cooldown for no reason.

You really think it has zero benefit whatsoever? Nothing malicious will be caught?

Pretty much. These tools are effective now only because the malware doesn’t have to avoid being detected at all to be successful.

How exactly does that work?

I don't think that HNers understand the recent supply chain attacks very well at all. I also don't think they realize the tests the SCA/package providers do to all the major packages.

Almost all these attacks try to reach out to external sites to steal your data. That is exceptionally hard to hide in any meaningful way.

    def steal_your_data():
      if datetime.now() < three_days_after_attack:
        return
      reach_out_to_external_sites()

OK, so it looks like you've still added suspicious code to your package.

You can make it much less suspicious. In particular, if you can compromise the package publishing process, and not just pushes to main, you can add your malicious code to binary artifacts, not to the source code.

That’s a bold claim to make about HNers. Au contraire, security companies have absolutely missed supply chain attacks.

Example:

https://snyk.io/blog/node-gyp-supply-chain-compromise-self-p...

Before that we had event-stream, then we had XZ compromise.

It’s not exceptionally hard to delay reaching out to external sites until after a cooldown period.

There are plenty of ways to notice a malicious release without observing it running.

Build provenance, maintainer alerts on new releases, tying releases to specific git tags, etc all help.

There was a story about two men and a tiger

The men see the tiger, one scrambles to run and the other starts putting on their shoes

"Why are you putting on shoes? You'll never outrun the tiger"

"I don't need to, I just need to outrun you"

When you're running from a bear on a hiking trip you just have to be faster than your friend. So just set your cooldown slightly longer than everyone else's cooldowns. The cooldown will give security researchers some time to scan the packages so it's still good.

I agree, it’s just the wrong approach. As a user, there’s no way to know if a package has been audited during the cooldown by some generous cybersecurity firm before you pull it in, it’s just wishful thinking. Minimizing your dependencies is a more effective strategy against supply chain attacks.

Hence by writing your own code with its own set of vulns to be detected.

Well, there’s always woodworking.

Unless you are a big enough target, there is still potential value to this. Is your business worth enough for someone to spend a lot of money hunting bespoke vulnerabilities? If not, your main risk is being swept in a vulnerability affecting a common dependency, and eliminating the common dependencies removes that risk.

The way to guarantee that is to pay one of those cybersecurity firms, that's basically their business.

And the most effective strategy is to audit and review your dependencies and any updates to them. That probably constrains how many you can have, but just minimizing them is reducing the size of the target, not protecting it per se.

If you currently use a 7 day cooldown on a 0 day default. You can just use a 10 day cooldown on a 3 day default. But don't tell anyone...

Watching language package managers reinvent everything distribution package managers have been doing since the 90s has been as fun as watching crypto people reinvent financial regulation.

The publishing topology is pretty fundamentally different: the entire power (and danger) of language package managers is that anybody can publish, not just a privileged few.

(This cuts both ways: I’d say that distribution package managers have learned valuable lessons about what users actually want from language package managers. Learning is a good thing.)

Why not to create a separate list of verified package versions for most popular packages, AKA «stable» channel?

Use stable channel for typical packages, use bleeding edge channel for some specific packages only.

> verified package versions

Who is doing this verification?

And then who watches the watchmen? Chains of authority can always be questioned. I think GP is suggesting that the package management platforms themselves provide the verification if they want to stay in the business of being the de facto source.

Those with skin in the game.

This comparison is tiresome. Distro package managers are curated, language package managers are not. They're serving completely different use cases; the former is the App Store, the latter is the web.

Give it two years.

Two years until... what, exactly?

They are literally solving the same problem, it’s just that distro packages operate on a lower level and thus receive more scrutiny. There have been plenty of examples of poisoned Linux packages, both at the source level and at the package level.

A distro package manager provides access to a small set of packages that the distro thinks you might like. A language package manager provides access to the full set of packages. The language level package manager is solving a more ambitious problem.

Distro package managers don't solve the problem they just punt on it, saying "you can add an unofficial source but you're on your own to maintain security". I agree with GP that the comparison is tiresome.

Debian stable has over 69,000 packages, which is more then some languages have…

It’s not about quantity but target audience and use case. They solve different problems.

I don’t understand how they aren’t both generalized to “distributes software with versioning at a large scale”

Because they both have very different management processes (centralized vs distributed) and release cycles. They solve different problems.

The difference comes from the fact distro maintainers choose the software they package, while language maintainers largely don't.

For example, how do you prevent somebody from phishing/typosquatting users with a package named similarly to a popular one? For distro maintainers the answer is simple - don't package it. Debian is unlikely to add a "f1refox" package. Language maintainers don't have that luxury.

I think that’s a difference in implementation details, not a difference in what it fundamentally is.

I’m not arguing that there aren’t differences between the two, I’m arguing that they are fundamentally the same solution (gather all of the software in one location with) to same problem (how can I safely download some software).

They are very fundamentally different solutions: the entire premise of distribution packaging is that you’re relying on some distribution maintainer’s discretion. It’s not an open index.

This is exactly what users wants in this case: someone need to check a package and mark it as safe to use.

Oh what?? Most package managers do try to prevent typo squatting!! Your insistence that there’s something fundamentally different between different package managers is just weird! Debian, as npm, lets you package and distribute software. The differences between them are related to policy preferences but the basic idea is the same!

69,000 sounds like a lot, but it's still missing maybe 30% of the packages I want to install.

Package them for Debian as well then?

Errm no? What kind of a solution is that?

I don’t know what’s up with this thread, for some reason people insist that language packages and distro packages are nearly the same.

There must be a lot of packages for languages that are useful that simply never make it into Debian stable. “Where’s the patch” really isn’t an answer for this.

> They are literally solving the same problem

No they’re not. Distro packages cater to end users and have very different release cycles and maintenance processes.

Distro packages are managed top-down (pushed by maintainers), while language packages are managed bottom-up (pushed by authors), so to say.

I agree it's tiresome that language package managers continue to be an embarrassment.

But actually your comparison is incorrect, distros are nothing like app stores. App stores are full of the same junk and malware as language package managers. Distros are vetted collections of real software that use modern best practices to secure the software supply chain.

Being unable to rotate the same weak RSA key for over a decade because it was too operationally cumbersome[1] does not strike me as “modern best practices.” I also don’t think any Linux distribution package maintainer would make a legally binding claim to have “vetted” packages: the filter is reputational, not a strong guarantee that the package is not malicious. The xz incident demonstrates that tidily: the only reason it was caught it because it was noisy; the package itself was presumed to be safe.

(This is, to be clear, fine. But we should be clear-headed about what package distribution mechanisms actually provide in terms of guarantees.)

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1461834

Two security incidents over decades is proof that distros are more secure, not less. Every other system for distributing software has weekly security issues.

> what package distribution mechanisms actually provide in terms of guarantees

1) Mirrors of cryptographically signed files to verify integrity (both the source code and the built packages), 2) a secure software supply chain & SBOM, 3) reproducible builds (for some distros), 4) humans independent of the authors vetting admittance of new packages to prevent obvious malware, 5) stable branches of packages that work together (preventing need to constantly upgrade, a source of new vulnerabilities), 6) backported security patches (necessary if you can't upgrade), 7) package maintainers fixing glaring security holes in the default installation methods of software to prevent the distro from having new vulnerabilities.

To be clear, the RSA key thing isn’t really about it being a security issue — that’s a part of it, but the bigger point was that it reflects structural failure/inertia that’s commonplace in distribution packaging.

(I am not a hater of distribution packaging, either. But I typically find comparisons between it and language packaging lacking, because the two have very different trust topologies.)

> language package managers are not [curated]

Why not? Seems like exactly what is being asked for.

Curated by whom?

If you want to curate a language package manager, there's nobody stopping you. Curation is a product that can trivially be built on top of an allow-by-default platform. If you want to make "NPM, except we've vetted all the packages", you can just do that, today, and you can even make use of all the OSS packages that already exist on NPM. Your hypothesis is that people want this, would value it if it existed, and would maybe even pay for it. So what's stopping people? Anyone who hasn't thought deeply enough to answer this question doesn't have the privelige to say "just curate it, what's the problem?". Curation isn't that simple, as any distro package manager volunteer would tell you.

> Anyone who hasn't thought deeply enough to answer this question doesn't have the privelige to say "just curate it, what's the problem?". Curation isn't that simple, as any distro package manager volunteer would tell you.

Your logic is self-defeating. How are distro volunteers going to know that you are interested in this topic if, by your logic, you don't have the privilege to ask them in the first place?

But I don't think that asking needs any privilege. I'm going to ask again: Why not? Or worded differently: What is stopping language package managers that is not at the same time stopping distro package managers?

I really hate dependabot making generic security people at work so pushy about updates updates updates. They seem to just be dogmatic about whatever dependabot says, forcing churn even when the documented issues are clearly not relevant. I’m not sure how to handle it politically. I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.

I'm in a similar camp, I dislike how often third-party package updates get pushed out, especially given the lack of serious inspection.

The reality is that each update is its own potential security issue and with supply chain attacks being all too frequent, it's not a panacea.

> The reality is that each update is its own potential security issue

Even beyond security issues: each update is a new opportunity for breakage, not only from bugs in the third-party package, but also from unexpected dependencies on the third-party package's behavior.

And that’s exactly why semantic versioning provides only an illusion of stability. This is also why ecosystems that don’t pin their versions such as floating versions that are the default in JavaScript ecosystems are so much more vulnerable from a security and a regression standpoint.

I’ve mainly handled it by pushing my team to be extremely conservative about what dependencies we take, especially if they pull in scads and scads of transitive dependencies.

This elegantly mitigates three problems in one go: update churn, dependency hell, and supply chain attack surface.

It also, frankly, tends to make the code easier to understand. I’m not a huge NIH person but I do have to say that a lot of packages these days tend to encourage ways of doing things that are unnecessarily complex. More than once I’ve replaced a dependency with homegrown code and reduced LOC in the same commit.

I don't know if all ecosystems are as bad as node is, but the node ecosystem has terrible issue severity ranking which makes infosec squeamish for no reason.

Every week or so there's a new High+ "vulnerability" that gets published against our dependencies and I have to go look at it to confirm that it's yet another case of "it's possible for someone to give this dev-only tool a bad regex that would cause the test runner to OOM on that branch".

The direct vs transitive split helps a lot here. Most of that noise is transitive deps your app never actually calls with attacker-controlled input.

I don't think transitive definitionally means we can ignore it. Any input that I give to my direct dependencies could theoretically end up inside of its dependencies and I can't know that it doesn't without auditing the source.

The actual split is on which environments the dependency exists in and who can control inputs in those environments. For most private companies who aren't running CI on an open source repo, the dev/prod split is the operative one that determines what you can safely ignore.

I feel the same. So so so many "regular expression denial-of-service" issues at my last job that just didn't seem serious or often reachable.

All of my services are internal, yet I am continually getting red alerts that there is a novel denial-of-service that needs to be patched immediately.

I keep getting things like "denial of service when the SCSS or whatever parse is given malicious input”. Great, that's part of the build chain, all of its inputs are stuff we control. Why do we care.

As a sysadmin I'm in the same boat. I've unfortunately never worked with security folks that seemed to have any sysadmin or dev experience. Whether or not this is universal, idk, and I have no idea what they are teaching in these security courses. But I'm tired of security teams telling me "you need to implement these 230 group policies this quarter" or whatever. They don't seem to grasp the externalities of a request like that and how much fucking work it is to vet, test, deploy, monitor, verify, etc. 80% of the time, they don't even know what they do or if it's even impactful for us.

As a previous sysadmin that does stuff in tangently related things to security (not the security person that makes these rules) I agree. The rules they come out with to address issues in operating systems that haven't been deployed in 10 years blows my mind.

"Ya, Windows something ancient had an issue with WevDAV 2 decades ago, but that is not a reason to block the http DELETE verb at the WAF"

> I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.

The issue of cooldowns aside (which is about delaying updates, not reducing their frequency): you're going to have the same set of problems when you update, whether you do it frequently or infrequently. The difference is that if you update frequently, you'll have a smaller set of updates (so it's easier to debug) and you'll have more opportunity to report issues upstream and fix them in a timely fashion.

It's the same underlying problem as CI and build time. Most people abandoned the concept of projects that take so long to build you can only do testing once a week, because CI that runs on every PR provides a much better experience. This is the same lesson applied to updates.

My logical read of the situation is that I end up making fewer overall changes if I end up upgrading a dependency once, not thrice, to a specific version. And the changes are their own source of risk.

In reality, one massive update is too big to digest and it never happens. So you're stuck on out-of-date packages having lost the ability to update.

That's never a problem until it suddenly is. Company is put at significant risk (courts want to reason by analogy and "engineers skipped maintenance and endangered people" is an easy one) and nobody is to blame since nobody owned the task.

Except I’ve been doing it this way for years and it’s not actually a real problem. Just an imagined one.

I think that’s the response the “it’s never a real problem until suddenly it is” observation was trying to head off.

There’s always someone who doesn’t want to take the advice of all the people who’ve been burned because “well it’s never happened to me.” I used to be that someone myself. Until the day it happened to me.

For most things in life that hit us periodically, we try to buffer them into manageable amounts so that when we address them, we do them all at once, benefiting from “economy of scale”, instead of having to constantly work on addressing everything that comes our way immediately. With package updates, however, another consideration is security: the longer you wait to release a security update, the more users may be vulnerable to it.

There’s no right answer. Every case is different, trying to impose a single rule for everyone just simplifies things beyond what is reasonable.

I've seen a similar benefit enforcing a 1 year instead of 3 year TLS cert lifetime limit in the past. It forces more automation and stronger processes.

Delaying non-security updates has the benefit of not wasting a team’s time when something regresses and is fixed in a quick follow up patch. Having to report issues upstream is not free.

Sure, by all means wait a week. Don't wait six months.

It's essentially blowback from the number-one security problem being out of date software with known vulnerabilities. It's also easy to measure without deeper knowledge of the system, so it gets focused on to the detriment of strategies based on deeper analysis and reducing overall attack surface.

This makes me think whether npm (and other registries) should apply security requirements based on ecosystem impact. Example a package having millions of downloads can have special security measures enforced.

What would be a security measure that should only be selectively enforced?

Higher cost (“Mythos” vs static code analysis) vulnerability scanning prior to successful merge to main branch or deployment as an artifact. As risk increases (popular code->greater exposure potential), increase automated, programmatic scrutiny on subject code to lower residual risk.

(application security and vulnerability management is a component of my work in financial services, thoughts and opinions always my own)

There are few ideas which come to my mind, some might be far fetched, taking NPM as an example.

- Restricting packages with similar names as of popular packages restrict expres because express is a popular package.

- Imposing stricter 2FA checks on accounts of authors of these packages.

- Making sure that published packages don't have vulnerabilities and clear npm audit.

- Alerts in case these packages contain a dependency which is new / relatively new.

Pre-publish to official security orgs. Does not get released into the wild until k of N auditors agree.

But updates to broken packages are still allowed: if a new version is pushed within the three days, it does not reset the cool-down. You just get a pull request to update to a known-bad version instead.

> Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request

So you exploit on Tuesday 12pm, dependabot opens a PR on Friday 12pm, people merge it, and your trojan's timer is set to go off over the weekend when nobody is patching.

Ways to configure 'dependency version cooldowns' into your project with npm, pnpm, yarn:

https://gist.github.com/mcollina/b294a6c39ee700d24073c0e5a4e...

This seems to be primarily an issue with a few specific package management solutions that have suffered SCA vulnerabilities recently, not generaly across the board.

It’s foolish to feel safe because your package management solution hasn’t been attacked yet.

The attack vector is generalized.

It’s rational to feel much safer in the Java packages ecosystem, where pinned versions are the default and the norm, and packages cannot run any install-time scripts.

Default cooldown for everyone is basically introducing a beta period for all packages.

"We don't call 'em 0days any more, now we call 'em 3days"

More like 3-per-day amirite

> The default applies only to version updates. Security updates still open immediately, so critical fixes are never delayed.

does this require a real vulnerability report, or CVE? if the package is compromised would they just be able to push a false "critical update" that bypasses this wait?

Requires a GitHub security advisory and

> Only advisories reviewed by GitHub trigger alerts.

From https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/concepts/supply-cha...

So it forces everyone to use more GitHub stuff?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this means I now need to submit to GitHub Security Advisor to get my security fix out ASAP?

Nothing changed here and it seems reasonable to me.

If you want GitHub to tell people about your security fix, someone needs to tell GitHub about the fix first.

AFAIK they mostly pull from the normal sources like NVD automatically, but you can also submit to GitHub directly.

The idiocy of cooldowns speaks for itself.

What a state of things where we have to fear installing software, and rely on vendors to scan things ahead of time, because our supply chain is such a mess and our tooling is so incapable of (and uninterested in) protecting us.

No way to prevent this says only package manager where this regularly happens.

Every major package manager is just as fucked.

You cannot call it a supply chain, if you have zero contractual relationships with the authors of the solutions you are using.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434355

Oh that one really makes you think doesn’t it.

I mean, that’s just arguing over whether or not the definition of “supply” implies “compensation”, which isn’t very interesting imho.

The grandparent’s point remains the same, the software ecosystem and its supply chain or however you want to call it is a hot mess.

Traditionally the term "supply chain" has implied a buyer/seller relationship

I think that’s up to debate, and my point is that debating whether free software counts as “supply” or not is really not that interesting.

So what?

What would a solution to this look like?

What would it take to not fear installing software? This isn't a npm problem, its a computing problem in general. Spaces like this are generally pretty against any sort of restrictions or limitations being put on computers under the name of safety (see Manifest v3)

Manifest v3's actual motive was so shamelessly transparent that most of us just don't allow the "safety" argument for it to really be entertained. I don't have a suspension of disbelief rich enough to pretend I don't know.

For libraries, I like the Gnu Affero Public License[1]. If you run the library in software with that license, you have to publish all the source of the entire project that incorporates it.

No corporation could tolerate this, though, so the library vendor can negotiate a commercial license of their software for appropriate fees.

That said, corporations are not going to want to negotiate fees with 100's of vendors over constantly fluctuating dependencies in their software.

This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.

Similar to Amazon's Dynamo API, whatever the next big language/ecosystem is needs to be designed around _billing_ and automatic license management for # of deployments, seats, call volumes, etc.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260712154038/https://www.gnu.o...

> This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.

I don't think this idea is going to go anywhere.

If a package is available for free, on convenient licensing terms, developers will use it.

If you make them pay, many developers will prefer to just build it themselves. Coding agents make that easier than ever.

Buying a package involves a lot more paperwork – it needs to go through procurement – and introduces new risks, e.g. what if the vendor increases their prices

There are potential exceptions – software with really advanced algorithms (e.g. solvers for optimisation problems); safety critical software; software needing regulatory certification (e.g. there are some Australian government APIs they won't let you call unless you've hired an auditor to certify the software you are calling them with, and the relevant government agency has approved the auditor's report) – but those exceptions are relatively rare, and the existing solutions are arguably adequate to handle them

I also think it is different for packaged SaaS applications [0] because there the buyer isn't a developer, it is someone non-technical, and "use a coding agent to build it yourself" isn't within their comfort zone or risk appetite (at least, not yet).

[0] conflict of interest disclaimer: work for a SaaS vendor

I don't disagree with you that freely distributed software on conveniently licensed terms is going to be the go-to stance for the majority of solo and non-commercial developers.

I just believe I could arrange the universe such that I get to have my cake (commercial licensing) and eat it too (with default open source licensing).

It is my experience that corporations do pay handsomely for software they use, even SaaS ones as the cost of doing business. Open source communities need mechanisms for funding that are consistent and low friction.

This is why the software language/repository/platform itself needs to facilitate license tracking and billing for alternative commercial licenses, to make it easy for corporations.

A successful new language effort that provides this facility need not be an enforcer except to say if an enterprise is willing and signed up to pay for any dependencies it uses, it is obligated to pay for all of them with something like AGPL 3 as the poison pill they have to swallow otherwise if they distribute or serve from any copyleft software.

Having simple, consistent rules that vendors and consumers have to follow with no rugpulls will be important for market acceptance. Having voluntary compliance with license terms will also be important to not turn people off from the ecosystem and to let them kick the tires. If software vendors want to distribute only unencumbered free and open source, then god bless 'em, they should be able to do it.

> What would a solution to this look like?

Sandboxing and auditing built into the software from the start. Browser Extensions solved this ages ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com