Alternative: Free Code, Expensive Problems
Alternative2: Zero Days, Zero Sleep
Picking up where last year’s FOSDEM presentation left off, Daniel Stenberg dives into the shifting front lines of the open source security vulnerability landscape. We went from manual bug hunting to the era of AI slop, watched automated reporting dismantle traditional bug bounties, navigated the high-quality report wave and a summer of bliss, and now face an endless torrent of vulnerability reports as LLMs take over the heavy lifting.
What once was a hard and time consuming work is now done in seconds with no human effort at all, while receving, assessing and handling the reports is still expensive and human intensive labor. Problems that previously were entirely theoretical can now be proven and exploited instantly, by anyone. More and faster updates for the entire world.
Underneath this high-velocity deluge, open source maintainers are still wrestling with the exact same core existential crisis we have faced for decades: how to sustain projects and survive burnout. Only now, the system is running at maximum load under unprecedented stress.