I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses[1]. The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.
From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].
[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
[2] https://www.sudo.ws/about/history/
In Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 yearssudo-project
sudo
C2020–2026
sudo-project / sudo
sudo
Utility to execute a command as another user
36Distinct people
40Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Utility to execute a command as another user
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year40 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-02-02 17:54:37 UTC to 2026-02-02 21:27:56 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 2 | 14 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 3 | 8 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
The sudo philosophy
Sudo is a program designed to allow a sysadmin to give limited root privileges
to users and log root activity. The basic philosophy is to give as few
privileges as possible but still allow people to get their work done.
Where to find sudo
Before building sudo, make sure you have the current version. The
latest sudo may always be gotten via anonymous ftp from ftp.sudo.ws
in the directory /pub/sudo/ or from the sudo web site, https://www.sudo.ws/
The distribution is sudo-M.m.tar.gz where M is the major version
number and m is the minor version number. Beta versions of sudo may
also be available. If you join the sudo-workers mailing list you
will get the beta announcements (see the Mailing lists section below).
What's new
See the NEWS file for a list of major changes in this release. For
a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog.
For a summary of major changes to the current stable release, see
https://www.sudo.ws/releases/stable/.
If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Sudo, read
docs/UPGRADE.md for information on changes in
behavior that may affect you.
For a history of sudo see docs/HISTORY.md.
You can find a list of contributors to sudo in
docs/CONTRIBUTORS.md.
Building the release
Read the installation guide, INSTALL.md, before trying
to build sudo. Pay special attention to the "OS dependent notes" section.
How to contribute
See docs/CONTRIBUTING.md for information on
how you can help contribute to sudo.
Copyright
Sudo is distributed under an ISC-style license.
Refer to LICENSE.md for details.
SAST Tools
PVS-Studio - static analyzer for C, C++, C#, and Java code.
Coverity Static Analysis
CodeQL
Clang Static Analyzer
Cppcheck
Mailing lists
sudo-announce
This list receives announcements whenever a new version of sudo is
released. https://www.sudo.ws/mailman/listinfo/sudo-announce
sudo-blog
This list receives a message when a new sudo blog article is
available. https://www.sudo.ws/mailman/listinfo/sudo-blog
sudo-commits
This list receives a message for each commit made to the sudo source
repository. https://www.sudo.ws/mailman/listinfo/sudo-commits
sudo-users
This list is for questions and general discussion about sudo.
https://www.sudo.ws/mailman/listinfo/sudo-users
sudo-workers
This list is for people working on and porting sudo.
https://www.sudo.ws/mailman/listinfo/sudo-workers
To subscribe to a list, visit its url (listed above) and enter your
email address to subscribe. Digest versions are available but these are
fairly low traffic lists so the digest versions are not a significant win.
Mailing list archives are also available. See the mailing list web sites
for the appropriate links.
Sudo web page
There is a sudo web page at https://www.sudo.ws/ that contains
documentation, downloads, a bug tracker, the source repo, the sudo
blog, information about beta versions and other useful info.
Filing bug reports/issues
If you believe you have found a bug, you can either file a bug
report in the sudo bug database, https://bugzilla.sudo.ws/, or open
a GitHub issue,
whichever you find easier. If you would prefer to use email,
messages may be sent to the sudo-workers@sudo.ws mailing
list (public)
or to sudo@sudo.ws (private).
For sudo's security policy and how to report security issues, see
docs/SECURITY.md.
Please check docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md
before submitting a bug report. When reporting bugs, be sure to
include the version of sudo you are using, the operating system
and/or distro that is affected, and, if possible, step-by-step
instructions to reproduce the problem.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
40 sourcesI thought this is about the other warning, which has since been removed:
https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/6aa320c96a376136...
In When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)Looking at the example of sudo it seems there are still plenty of regular and recent commits.
https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commits/main/
In Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
I can think of sudo (https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/graphs/contributors) which is maintained by just one person and is being used by every major linux distribution
106 points · Open discussionIt depends on whether sudo was compiled with --disable-env-reset or not, it's on by default[1].
Also some variables are inherited regardless (e.g. DISPLAY, TERM), and some useful ones (e.g. HOME) are initialized by sudo, but I can't tell where that's done.
[1]: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/ef52db46f9b375d7ff...
In Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announcedsudo is just another program, it's not "baked in" as such. It just ships with many (not all) distros. I remember having to install it from repos in the past on a new system: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo
In Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announcedHis methodology actually favors systemd, as sudo is for example vendoring its dependencies in the repository.
diath@11km :: /tmp » git clone https://github.com/systemd/systemd
diath@11km :: /tmp » cloc --match-f="(c|h)" systemd/src
C 1478 165173 37638 584876
C/C++ Header 1083 15580 22432 59692
diath@11km :: /tmp » git clone https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo
diath@11km :: /tmp » cloc --match-f="(c|h)" sudo/{src,include}
C 41 2104 3359 16384
C/C++ Header 36 797 2159 5158
In Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announcedJust a side note: sudo is largely maintained by just one dude https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/graphs/contributors
In Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announcedSide note that I've always found interesting: sudo is almost entirely maintained by one dude: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/graphs/contributors
In Sudo for WindowsThe n=2 case also occurs in the commit: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/7873f8334c8d3103...
And indeed, the two values ate bitwise complements.
In Try to make sudo less vulnerable to Rowhammer attacksTry to make sudo less vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks
179 points · Open discussionHuh, it took 6 years for the joke to get added: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/c1d6e86d67aa60d7...
In The first stable release of a memory safe sudo implementationOne feature they didn't mention they left out was the ability to run `make me a sandwich` (https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/Makefile.in#L...)
In The first stable release of a memory safe sudo implementationYou're probably running into this: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/7058
`cargo vendor` will download dependencies and dev dependencies for all platforms, which leads to a lot of unused code being pulled in. In this case, the Windows API and Microsoft compiler wrappers.
In this instance, during the build process "tempfile" is used as a dev-dependency, which has a runtime dependency on windows-sys when compiling Windows binaries. I'm not entirely sure why (commenting it out in Cargo.toml doesn't seem to break the build).
After commenting it out and manually removing the spurious Windows API files as well as the unrelated packages (`cd vendor; rm -rf ctor diff output_vt100 pretty_assertions proc-macro2 quote syn unicode-ident yansi win*`), I get the following results:
0.0358 secs
┌─────────────────────────────────────
Read the rest
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
| Language files size blank comment code |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Bash 3 939.00 B 7 2 30 |
| C 1 1.31 KB 5 6 44 |
| C Header 1 226.00 B 0 0 7 |
| D 15 31.75 KB 32 0 143 |
| JSON 22 39.69 KB 0 0 22 |
| Markdown 16 53.46 KB 425 0 1054 |
| Rust 396 4.98 MB 13852 9502 131650 |
| Shell 5 2.24 KB 11 18 50 |
| Toml 14 9.60 KB 54 61 319 |
| Yaml 2 10.14 KB 70 0 341 |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Sum 475 5.13 MB 14456 9589 133660 |
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
As a comparison, this is the output for https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo:
0.0439 secs
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
| Language files size blank comment code |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Autoconf 124 1.90 MB 2618 4317 59031 |
| C 365 4.20 MB 15977 22626 111340 |
| C Header 90 1.14 MB 1816 4911 18803 |
| JSON 7 9.22 KB 0 0 236 |
| Markdown 10 133.62 KB 676 0 2498 |
| Pascal 3 33.63 KB 79 0 925 |
| Perl 2 12.81 KB 54 83 306 |
| Plain Text 1 15.00 B 0 0 1 |
| Protocol Buffer 2 5.54 KB 22 0 185 |
| Python 10 26.41 KB 152 259 295 |
| Shell 77 358.96 KB 1589 2534 8961 |
| Yaml 4 7.98 KB 16 38 205 |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Sum 695 7.81 MB 22999 34768 202786 |
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
It should be noted that the sudo project's dependencies and autogenerated code aren't included in this overview
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