[conspire] Candidate for tech. article of the year

[Rick Moen]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/

  Buffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call
  40,000 lines of flawed code almost made it into FreeBSD's kernel—we
  examine how.

  JIM SALTER - 3/26/2021, 3:00 AM

This is crackerjack reporting from Mr. Salter.  Basically, an aggressive
company assigned one of its employees to get support for WireGuard, an
encrypted point-to-point tunneling protocol, into the FreeBSD kernel to
benefit their FreeBSD-based routers.  The employee was dog-tired (from
long COVID) and distracted, checking into FreeBSD-current (but not
FreeBSD-release) some fairly dreadful code -- and at no point was there
any code review by anyone.

The mishap was really nobody's fault specifically, and part of the
genius of Salter's reporting is that he makes clear how this Just
Happened.  And, as the author notes, the benefit of open source that
anyone can review the code is largely lost if nobody does.

-- 
Cheers,                          Grammarian's bar joke #26:  A gerund and an 
Rick Moen                        infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
rick at linuxmafia.com                                                           
McQ! (4x80)