JEDEC has long maintained an EOL/EOS standard for semiconductors. This was a big part of a previous PM gig. Sounds boring, and it was. But having a process kept us out of serious hot water.
repelsteeltje · 1h ago
I think it will take a while for people to realize this effort looked great, but wasn't the right approach. Or no silver bullet, at least.
The presentation with a simple diagram that combines this data with an sbom to yield "information" gives me navel gazing vibes of UML being the future of coding.
Just as architecture didn't equate to well designed and maintainable software, I fear this initiative won't fix horribly outdated and vulnerable deployments. Software life cycle, deprecation, abandonment, supply chains are mostly a process problem, standards and technology won't fix that.
Arnavion · 53m ago
It doesn't force someone who already wasn't checking their dependencies for CVEs / maintained-ness to start doing that. It does make someone who *was* doing that be able to show they're doing that in some standard way, which makes it easier for compliance audits and such.
In other words it doesn't force you to add an SBOM + EOX checker step to your CI pipeline. But if your auditor wants you to check your dependencies, adding such a standardized step makes it easier to satisfy the auditor.
wpollock · 1h ago
In my experience, many software projects become abandoned and no notice is given. I don't see how this standard helps in such cases.
wallrat · 1h ago
How does this relate to the OWASP/Ecma Common Lifecycle Enumeration Specification (https://tc54.org/cle/)?
feldrim · 2h ago
An SBOM-like approach to EOL/EOS issues is on the way.
rollcat · 1h ago
I think the only large projects that presently take SBOMs seriously are Nix, Guix, and Go (non-cgo). Bootstrapping is non-trivial, but at least builds are reproducible and can be compared against existing binaries.
"Oh, just write plain C". Which compiler do you mean? GCC? LLVM/clang? On top of what OS/kernel? What firmware? Etc.
Arnavion · 50m ago
Some distros packaging Rust software (OpenSUSE at least) also transparently set up CARGO=cargo-audit to get embedded SBOMs.
The presentation with a simple diagram that combines this data with an sbom to yield "information" gives me navel gazing vibes of UML being the future of coding.
Just as architecture didn't equate to well designed and maintainable software, I fear this initiative won't fix horribly outdated and vulnerable deployments. Software life cycle, deprecation, abandonment, supply chains are mostly a process problem, standards and technology won't fix that.
In other words it doesn't force you to add an SBOM + EOX checker step to your CI pipeline. But if your auditor wants you to check your dependencies, adding such a standardized step makes it easier to satisfy the auditor.
"Oh, just write plain C". Which compiler do you mean? GCC? LLVM/clang? On top of what OS/kernel? What firmware? Etc.