Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
The Nebraska problem in open source software development
Masayuki Hatta
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2022 Volume 21 Issue 5 Pages 91-102

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Abstract

In the world of open source constructed on the basis of the Unix philosophy, there are cases of unsung heroic programs in obscure locations being maintained in a detailed way by a single unknown person or a small number of unknown people, mainly for personal reasons. However, if once these small programs close to the bottom rung of the ladder break, it may cause a loss of balance and collapse of our entire modern infrastructure. This is referred to as the Nebraska Problem in this paper. We can see from the actual and serious case of the Heartbleed bug that “the number of eyeballs” taken for granted in Linus's Law up to this point needs to be proactively secured, and we need to consider complementary measures, such as SBOM, against risk in advance.

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© 2022 Masayuki Hatta. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) license. The CC BY 4.0 license permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution 4.0 International] license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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