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Comment by Lammy

3 days ago

[flagged]

> Anubis is a clone of Kiwiflare, not an original work, so you're actually sort of half-right:

Interesting. That itself appears to be a clone of haproxy-protection. I know there has also been an nginx module that does the same for some time. Either way, proof-of-work is by this point not novel.

Everyone seems to have overlooked the more substantive point of my comment which is that it appears kernel.org cheaped out and is using the free version of Anubis, instead of paying up to support the developer for his work. You know they have the money to do it.

In 2024 the Linux Foundation reported $299.7M in expenses, with $22.7M of that going toward project infrastructure and $15.2M on "event services" (I guess making sure the cotton candy machines and sno-cone makers were working at conferences).

My point is, cough up a few bucks for a license you chiselers.

  • > Everyone seems to have overlooked the more substantive point of my comment which is that it appears kernel.org cheaped out and is using the free version of Anubis, instead of paying up to support the developer for his work. You know they have the money to do it. > > In 2024 the Linux Foundation reported $299.7M in expenses, with $22.7M of that going toward project infrastructure and $15.2M on "event services" (I guess making sure the cotton candy machines and sno-cone makers were working at conferences). > > My point is, cough up a few bucks for a license you chiselers.

    Several points:

    - there is no license to pay. This is free (as in open source and as in beer) software. There is commercial support if you feel you need it and sponsoring options however. Sponsoring is not paying a license.

    - Sometimes it takes so long to get approval for a sponsor that large org member give up.

    - Obviously kernel.org is using an old release of anubis so they likely observed a huge spike in bandwith used at some point and used anubis, solving the problem immediately. I don't remember anubis proposing a paid license at the time of the early releases. I may be wrong but it may be that kernel.org admins have never heard of the possibly of sponsoring nor are they interested in support.

    - you don't have to pay anythinf to change/remove the image and the people who implemented this clearly do not care as they didn't do it.

    - do we have evidence that the anubis developer ever donated directly or indirectly to Linus Torvalds and the thousands of developers who worked on the kernel?

Anubis has nothing to do with Kiwiflare, there's no connection at all. It's not the same codebase, and the inspiration for Anubis comes from Hashcash (1997) and numerous other examples of web PoW that predate Kiwiflare, which perhaps tens of thousands of websites were already using as an established technique. What makes you think it is a clone of it?

Can somebody please explain why was this comment flagged to death? I seem to be missing something

  • Possibly because it links to kiwifarms (nasty website to say the least)

  • Well, it's both complete misinformation and attempts to tie a reputable open source project to an unrelated harassment and stalking website.

I saw the description and thought "Wow! That works just like the DDOS retarding" of KiwiFlare. I didn't know it was a proper fork of it.