Comment on [deleted]

CriticalMiss@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• devil_d0c@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Big tech won’t chip in is my bet. My company maintains its own version of Linux that has some specific certifications. Updating that box requires an act of god. My bet is that the companies that can afford to will create their own “LTS” versions that just get older and older, and more broken and exploited as time goes on…

  Sorry, long night at work =/

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  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    My bet is that the companies that can afford to will create their own “LTS” versions that just get older and older, and more broken and exploited as time goes on

    So more like a “Long Term Unsupported” LTU?

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    • Poggervania@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I vote for “Long-Term Supported But We Cut The Staff Down To The IT Intern”, or LTSBWCTSDTTITI for short.

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    • Vqhm@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They will trade in the Confidentiality and Integrity for just Availability.

      When something like a hack finally drops the availability they will be forced to act.

      They will never do a pentest tho.

      Same story all over from government, small companies, all the way up to medical in big corporate hospitals and systems that could cause harm to human life.

      Security is at most a checkbox somewhere that just gets checked regardless of the true state of the system. If it still works don’t fix it.

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• GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Big tech won't suffer. They will just fork and maintain (and probably enshittify) their own kernel.

  Small and mid tech will suffer, however. The article just mentions Android as the prime example for embedded systems and forgets to mention that 80-90% of industrial embedded systems run on Linux.

  Those will either be driven to Microsoft's shitty half-done, hardly documented embedded OS versions or some company rises as the white knight offering and maintaining LTS Linux kernels. Both scenarios will increase cost of course that will eventually come out of us consumers' pockets. The former, worse scenario will make industrial applications less secure on top.

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  • Takios@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Do Redhat and SUSE not maintain their own LTS kernels for their enterprise distributions?

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• dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Pretty sure all big tech companies already have engineers on payroll for this specific reason. Intel, Microsoft, Google, Amazon have SWEs working on the kernel, networking, even DEs for their own needs and integrations.

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  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And yet still the maintainers don’t want to maintain 6 yo kernels because it’s cumbersome and an unpaid position.

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    • nous@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Unpaid? A lot of kernel devs do get paid, especially the core ones that would be looking after this stuff.

      75% – The share of all kernel development that is done by developers who are being paid for their work.

      pingdom.com/…/linux-kernel-development-numbers/

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• tastysnacks@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Does big tech run 6 yo kernels? This seems like a corporation problem not wanting to spend the money properly maintaining their systems. If big tech isn’t dogfooding a 6yo kernel, it doesn’t make sense to do it.

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  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, according to the article, while this doesn’t affect the PC/server as much because the distributions take care of security for the most part, where this will have problems is the phone/IoT space (which is why Linux initially started maintaining 6 yo kernels, to cater to that market).

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    • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s not like most phones are getting updates past two years at this point anyway, and while it would be nice if we could actually get software updates and keep our devices longer, I have my doubts that is ever going to happen on Android. I have more faith that someday I’ll get my dream RISC-V powered phone with several Linux distros to choose between or even dual boot.

      IoT devices are a slightly different story, but I’m skeptical that Linux offering 6 year kernels has made a meaningful difference in those devices actually getting updates.

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      • exscape@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The article points out that the kernel version used in a phone is basically frozen when development of the device starts. They're suggesting that at 2 years of support, the kernel will be EOL about when the phone is released.

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      • Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        See the Fairphone, you might be surprised

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  • anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Think printers, factory machines and so on. If they run Linux and not Windows CE, it’s always ancient.

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• betz24@lemmynsfw.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Big tech chipping in is how we get Amazon spyware/Microsoft apps built into OS. I agree with respectable salary for developers. I think if Linux org ran the same campaign as Wikipedia it would gather a lot more donations. The whole world runs on some form of the Linux kernel.

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  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s not how the Linux kernel works…

    The final decision on what is merged into the kernel is Linus’ decision and that’s how it’s been the last 30 years.

    Microsoft bakes spyware into the operating system because they own the NT kernel and the Windows OS.

    Amazon clones the Linux kernel, modifies it and adds it’s own garbage software, then builds it.

    The main Linux kernel is free of any spy shit and that’s how it’s likely going to remain.

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    • betz24@lemmynsfw.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      While I agree, Linus isn’t getting younger and as we are seeing, long time lead maintainers are starting to step down. It would be a shame if Linux kernel and subsequently it’s OS’s, turns into what happened to Android. We see it happening time and time again (e.g. Reddit, Twitter), when there is the possibility for more revenue, these companies will kill anything that was developed 'for the people ’

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    • anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      At least any spy shit that we know of. Just look at the obfuscated C contest what’s possible in that abomination of a language.

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      • RobbieGM@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Any code that is anywhere near that unreadable let alone purposefully obfuscated is not making it past the review process

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