Soursen

Independent writing on infrastructure, AI, security and crypto.

linux

Published Soursen pieces tagged linux, page 2, with the standfirst and the beat. Every fact is checked against the source.

Banner for “The 23-Year Lawsuit That Claimed to Own Part of Linux Just Died”

Linux & open source

The 23-Year Lawsuit That Claimed to Own Part of Linux Just Died

On 10 August 2026 a US appeals court threw out the last live appeal in a legal fight that started with a forgotten 1998 UNIX project, ran through a $5 billion lawsuit, a bankruptcy, an asset sale, and a fresh filing in 2021. For 23 years a private company kept claiming it owned code sitting inside the Linux kernel. I went through the whole saga, because it is the closest the open source world ever came to a genuine extinction event, and because the thing that finally killed it was not a ruling on who was right.

10 min read

Banner for “The Arch AUR Keeps Getting Hit With Malware, and the Fixes All Cost Something”

Security

The Arch AUR Keeps Getting Hit With Malware, and the Fixes All Cost Something

On 13 October 2026 an account mass uploaded a pile of packages to the Arch User Repository that looked like the popular helper yay and ran code the attacker controlled as root the moment you installed them. It was the fourth malware wave on the AUR in about 15 months. I went through what actually happened, how the trick worked at the file level, and why the obvious fix is the one thing that would stop the AUR from being the AUR.

11 min read

Banner for “The Linux Kernel Just Dropped Its AI Disclosure Tag, and the Fight Over It Says More Than the…”

Linux & open source

The Linux Kernel Just Dropped Its AI Disclosure Tag, and the Fight Over It Says More Than the…

At the Maintainer Summit in Prague, the people who run the Linux kernel reached a rough consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by tag, the little line in a commit that says AI helped write it. I went through who proposed it, the real numbers behind it, and the argument it set off, including Linus Torvalds calling the whole idea of AI disclosure rules utterly stupid, because the kernel is quietly becoming one of the most AI touched projects in open source.

12 min read

Banner for “systemd Wants to Know Which App Is Talking to It. That Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds”

Linux & open source

systemd Wants to Know Which App Is Talking to It. That Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds

A proposed component called systemd-appd would give the Linux desktop a shared way to identify running apps and check their permissions, the thing Android and macOS have had for years. I went through the actual proposal and the debate around it, because the technical fix is reasonable and the question of where it lives is the part people are actually fighting about.

9 min read

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