Authors of useless rewrites do:

* skip the hard part: designing, getting user feedback and designing again;

* get straight to the fun part: coding in their favorite language after a well-established and proven design;

* get to call themselves "creator of XXX-rs", where "XXX" is a well-known brand and "-rs" is often overlooked.

would it be better if they didn't skip the hard part? (i.e. if they re-designed it from first principles) does something being hard to do make it more virtuous?

would it be better if they didn't have fun coding it? is something worse if it was fun to make?

I meannnnnn…

Pedantically, the “stolen valor” metaphor absolutely doesn’t fit here; you’re just griping about the “sudo brand” being used in another project’s title (which … citation needed, and so what? Is “doas” not committing theft but “sudo-improved” is?)

More generally, that’s an easy case to make against any software you don’t like: “it’s just reimplementing $whatever and trying to pretend to be the original therefore it’s unethical”. Some rewrites are good, and a huge benefit of the act of rewriting is that you do have a clear blueprint and understanding of the requirements (hell, Linux was a rewrite). Should the original creators of a thing be the only people who can ethically rewrite it? Where’s the line here?

A security-focused rewrite of a security-critical program that removes insecure features and prevents whole classes of vulnerabilities from being introduced in the future is hardly “useless”.

For the love of God, drop the culture war BS. We get it, you don’t like Rust.

You don’t get to act so self-righteous when you do absolutely nothing to justify the assertion that sudo-rs is “useless”.

I look forward to hearing your argument that doesn’t end in “the memory safety footguns of C are massively overstated”, or “there is no value in having a sudo alternative that ditches antiquated, insecure functionality”

I like Rust.

I hate the virtue signaling.