[shaki-dora]

That's the sort of tough-guy prepper-with-a-slide-rule speech that people (apparently) just can't get enough of. But does it mean anything?

There is no bright line delimitating what's on the "critical path" and what's not. Your servers? The electric grid? The datacenter? The backbone(s) it's connected to? The judicial system making contracts enforceable? NATO? Name any two that straddle the line, and anybody can come up with something in between them, because it's a continuum.

[groby_b]

Welcome to a world were engineers aren't paid to copy code from Stack Overflow, but to make actual judgment calls.

What's the chance of the grid going down? What's the cost of it? Is the expected value significantly higher than a power generator? Congrats, you just bought a power generator.

Backbone down would cause you huge financial losses? Well, whaddaya say, let's build more backbone.[1]

Any redundancy that costs significantly less than the losses it mitigates will be built. The only reason we're not seeing a private NATO yet is that it costs more than pretty much any company makes. But 5,000 people security forces? Damn skippy those exist[2]

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/building-... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-off-duty-police-off...

[acrispino]

The lack of a bright line doesn't make the idea meaningless. It's just a judgement call.

It's not unreasonable to be more concerned about an open source library disappearing than say, postgresql or mysql disappearing. No macho posturing required.

[savanaly]

But people who complain about this stuff usually don't frame it that way-- absolutist statements like from the GP: "Anything you use in a critical path you should control." are common. The message is typically "I realize something fundamental that you don't and I'm owning all my dependencies and you don't own any of yours," rarely "I made a different choice about dependency ownership and here are the reasons I think that's appropriate for you too."

[acrispino]

You seemed to take a pretty holistic, system-wide view of "critical path" which is fine. Do we know if the other person meant that?

Let's say I'm working front-end web development. My "critical path" might include: js bundler, some kind of application framework, various libs, etc. The scope of my work (and authority/responsibility) informs what I can reasonably have under my control.

[xamuel]

GitHub could completely disappear and it wouldn't cause mass societal chaos or the breakdown of civilization. Those other things you listed, if they disappeared, there's quite a good chance they would cause mass societal chaos or the breakdown of at least certain civilizations. If the judicial system suddenly disappears, I reckon we'll have other things to worry about besides how it affects our build-chains.

[enraged_camel]

Don’t forget payments, which are arguably the most critical part of any software that costs money.