Following publication, Miller has been in touch to tell us that he has no plans to abandon sudo, or even hand it off, but he suspects change is still on the horizon for the essential tool.

“While I don’t expect to maintain sudo for an additional 30 years, I also don’t currently have someone to pass the torch to,” Miller told us. He noted that the xz utils backdoor has made him hesitant to hand it off to someone he doesn’t know, and that he “feels responsible for sudo” after having spent so long as its lead dev and maintainer.

Unfortunately, a lack of financial backing means sudo work has ground to a glacial pace.

“Since I have limited time I’ve mostly been focused on fixing bugs and cleaning up the code base rather than adding new features,” Miller said. “As a result the amount of time I spend is heavily influenced by the bug reports I receive.”

Funding or not, Miller expects sudo-rs to become the next generation of the tool in coming years.

“Ubuntu is already shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo command in their latest versions,” Miller told us. “I’ve been in contact with the people working on sudo-rs since the project started and I trust them to do right by the sudo user base.”

Regardless of what happens, Miller agrees the sudo situation he’s in is yet another example of how open-source maintainers is putting the entire computing community in a bind.

“Without some form of assistance it is untenable,” Miller said. “Maintainer burn-out is real.”