Miller has been maintaining sudo since 1993. According to sudo’s website, Miller’s former employer, Quest Software, served as sudo’s sponsor beginning in 2010, but its sponsorship of sudo ended in February 2024, which coincides with Miller’s departure from Quest subsidiary One Identity.
Seems surreal that such fundamental software should be maintained by just one person.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/sudo_maintainer_asks_for_help/
Yeah and why no one is paying him? For his service.
It’s to much freebie mentality in open source!
People who do good work should be rewarded for their work!
I took Todd to dinner (all I could really do) back in ‘98. I had contributed some code to sudo in previous years. He’s a nice guy and I was glad to have met him a few times in person.
We’re definitely in this odd situation where a lot of the “old guard” are aging out, it absolutely exposes the strengths and weaknesses of the tool stack in open source. Singular “points of failure” that are human, prone to exhaustion, other focuses, and just life in general.
A part of me wonders whether eventually, for better or worse, maintainence of packages would shift to automation and, dare I say it, AI toolsets.
Thanks for contributing to a software that I use daily. 
My fear is that nowadays a lot of people simply accept the open source stack as a given, and hardly appreciate the work, the effort that was needed to get where we are, and the effort it takes to ensure that things keep working, as most of the work is invisible to the end user.
This seems like the kind of thing that every independent distro should have been contributing to, especially the ones with corporate funding.
This is not the kind of thing individual users should have to hear about, or consider helping to fund.
Same goes for the kernel, systemd, X.org, Wayland, calamaries, and so on. Also, every distro that prioritizes other init systems should be contributing to those init systems directly.
Individuals should be funding packages made for users, not packages essential to the distro working correctly.
In my opinion, at least.
I sorta agree with you (in principle at least), but given what we’ve seen in life, do you really trust any sort of organization as fund oversight? I’m not sure I do.
But yes, what motivated me was that I had improved processes by incorporating sudo vs their old system of sealed envelopes with root password in them 
I somewhat agree.
But…
If it is that we can’t trust that funding user-facing packages eventually leads to the funding of essential system packages, then why bother funding user-facing packages?
That’s not a cycle we want, so some trust is needed. This is where transparency plays a role.
I wouldn’t call sudo an essential package, but definitely a nice-to-have. You can certainly run a machine without it.
But I sorta get that you mean infrastructure packages?
Yeah, packages that we use regularly that are so deep in the core of our systems, uninstalling them would mean uninstalling pretty much everything else.
I’d call sudo essential because it is needed in order to install/uninstall packages, run some maintenance tools, etc. Sure, there is run0, and others that are less used, but when a new user decides to try out Linux, sudo is usually part of one of the first commands they are told to run in a terminal.
Even for distros that try to keep the user away from the terminal, they tell them that if something is not working, run “sudo blahblahblah”.
Don’t forget the way we USED to do it ‘su - root’ 
It still works…well usually at least.
Is su - root the same as just typing su then running commands as root?
You get the profile ran and environment setup with the former, at least as I recall. Just like everyone else, i do usually use sudo these days.