I just installed an update to my phone’s OS, which required a reboot. The screen went blank for longer than I expected and I got to wondering if that was the end for my phone. Then I got to wondering if it could be intentional – if the developers decided that they had enough of the project and hated their userbase enough to have the last update brick their phones.
Two seconds later, the reboot proceeded successfully so that scenario clearly isn’t the case for /e/os, but the question remains – has anyone done anything like that and what were the ramifications?
The closest thing I can think of is the
left_padincident. It wasn’t a malicious change to the code, but simply unpublishing the package caused global chaos.Oh that was a good one. The best response was left pad as a service.
Excerpted from Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software:
When the desired [laser printer driver source code] files failed to surface, however, Stallman began to grow suspicious. The year before, Stallman had experienced a blow up with a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University. The student, Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting program dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that gave a user the power to define fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network, the program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. In 1979, Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain. To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions- “time bombs” in software-programmer parlance-that deactivated freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.
For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn’t fall into the public domain, and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access.
I think there was an incident of some software dev releasing an update which nuked your hard drive if you had a Russian IP (to protest Ukraine war)
