Re:Making Open Source software safer and more secure
by Gigachad on Thursday January 13, 2022 @06:29PM
(#29928491)
There aren’t enough simple and nice words for every project to have a unique one. It’s usually pretty easy to find what you want. Just search “salsa Debian”
Re:Making Open Source software safer and more secure
by jka on Thursday January 13, 2022 @08:11PM
(#29929340)
More-or-less agreed, yep, it's a tricky problem. To compare with technical solutions, I guess the options available are things like namespaces, lexical scoping, or (bleh) more verbose variable naming; perhaps something along those lines could be helpful.
For example, Microsoft's operating system name "Vista" shadows the name of perhaps the longest-running open source software project in existence.
And Google's project name "Salsa" shadows the GitLab version control repository for Debian packages.
It's most likely pure coincidence, or perhaps imitation as a form of flattery; and probably also not infringing in any technical copyright or trademark sense.
Securing open source software will require disambiguation of software by package name. I think they could lead by example by disambiguating their own initiative names; that will be part of the problem space before too long (in other words, knowing more clearly what services and participants are involved in the overall ecosystem).