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by jspdown 23 days ago
I find this kind of rewrite both disrespectful and completely useless. Useless because the difficulty isn't getting to a working state but maintaining it. You now have to build a community around it to make any of this worthwhile. What would this software be worth if security issues weren't patched and bugs weren't fixed? You can't do this alone. And I find it disrespectful because people have spent decades building this, and you're taking all that collectively built knowledge to create something that will compete with the project itself.

I hope people will restrain themself from doing this at least in the name of good ethic. I fear this is going to hurt OSS a lot.

I hope people will hold back from this, if only out of respect for the work that came before. I fear it could do real damage to OSS. It would discourage the maintainers whose effort makes any of it possible.

1 comments

Hmm I view open source as purely positive sum. Valkey was forked from Redis in the first place.

But this is more about memory safety - you can have immense respect for the giants who built these tools but also be worried that memory safety might become an even bigger deal. If someone found a memory zero day in nginx or openSSL for example that is a very big deal!

I think this is one strategy we should look into, hopefully people in the C community look into other options like project Glasswing/ next generation fuzzers etc. When the world of security is changing so fast it is good to get a lot of shots on net.

And what if someone gets pwned by a bog standard logic or input validation bug in your slopped together "nginx" that is not present in the original?
And what if they get owned by a memory safety issue that's in the original and not the rewrite?

I know many of these projects have been around for years but it's time for developers to put on their big boy panties and start taking memory safe languages seriously. Watching the same attacks again and again for 30 years is getting droll.

If someone is running projects with a big "alpha" tag in production, exposed to the web they very well might get pwned haha!