Squires’ bold move draws attention to the moral — and financial — dilemma of open-source development, which was likely the goal of his actions. A massive number of websites, software, and apps rely on open-source developers to create essential tools and components — all for free. It’s the same issue that results in unpaid developers working tirelessly to fix the security issues in their open-source software, like the Heartbleed scare in 2014 that affected OpenSSL and the more recent Log4Shell vulnerability found in log4j that left volunteers scrambling to fix.

Neuromancer pushes back at the idea that technical advance always results in progress. This book is still surprising, still relevant, and it still deals with unanswered questions.

What we’ve come to experience more fully, in the years since Neuromancer was written, and especially since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, is the internationalization of information and cultural life. So much of life takes place on the Internet now

Debian is not the only project that suffers from this.

Despite the fact that Red Hat is an enterprise Linux distribution, the problems goes even further there where you e.g. still can find a so-called LTS version of PHP 5 that long since should have been permanently terminated.

Update 2022-04-01: Someone asked me about Alpine Linux, whether Alpine is suffering from the same problem. The answer is yes, only not to the same extent as Debian.