Comment by LtWorf
7 hours ago
Remember when google set up a whole project to find vulnerabilities but never sent any fix and unpaid developers were basically having to fix things that an entire team of people was hired to find… yeah maybe they could have just made an offer to some maintainers instead of burning them out?
Is this an oblique reference to OSS Fuzz, or something else?
It seems weird to blame Google here, given that they didn’t manufacture the bugs: the bugs were already there, and they just found them. This is arguably the best thing for all parties: open source maintainers are still under no obligation to fix things, but downstreams can properly inform themselves about the risks they inherit by using any given project.
The alternative is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” system, which people generally agree doesn’t work well in other aspects of life.
They are contributing back, which is a good thing. Other companies just fork, fix, and forbid to contribute back.
Burning out maintainers isn't "contributing back".
Do you have any examples of Google submitting vulnerabilities and refusing to assist maintainers create a patch when asked to do so?
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