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    1: A Brief History of Sudo:
    2: 
    3: The Early Years
    4: 
    5: Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer
    6: around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo. It ran on
    7: a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated version, credited to Phil Betchel,
    8: Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips, John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to
    9: the net.sources Usenet newsgroup in December of 1985.
   10: 
   11: Sudo at CU-Boulder
   12: 
   13: In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version of sudo.
   14: For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful of folks at
   15: CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and Trent Hein.
   16: 
   17: Root Group Sudo
   18: 
   19: In 1991, Dave Hieb and Jeff Nieusma wrote a new version of sudo with an
   20: enhanced sudoers format under contract to a consulting firm called "The Root
   21: Group". This version was later released under the GNU public license.
   22: 
   23: CU Sudo
   24: 
   25: In 1994, after maintaining sudo informally within CU-Boulder for some time,
   26: Todd C. Miller made a public release of "CU sudo" (version 1.3) with bug
   27: fixes and support for more operating systems. The "CU" was added to
   28: differentiate it from the "official" version from "The Root Group".
   29: 
   30: In 1995, a new parser for the sudoers file was contributed by Chris Jepeway.
   31: The new parser was a proper grammar (unlike the old one) and could work with
   32: both sudo and visudo (previously they had slightly different parsers).
   33: 
   34: In 1996, Todd, who had been maintaining sudo for several years in his spare
   35: time, moved distribution of sudo from a CU-Boulder ftp site to his domain,
   36: courtesan.com.
   37: 
   38: Just Plain Sudo
   39: 
   40: In 1999, the "CU" prefix was dropped from the name since there had been no
   41: formal release of sudo from "The Root Group" since 1991 (the original
   42: authors now work elsewhere). As of version 1.6, Sudo no longer contains any
   43: of the original "Root Group" code and is available under an ISC-style
   44: license.
   45: 
   46: In 2001, the sudo web site, ftp site and mailing lists were moved from
   47: courtesan.com to the sudo.ws domain (sudo.org was already taken).
   48: 
   49: LDAP Integration
   50: 
   51: In 2003, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company contributed code written by
   52: Aaron Spangler to store the sudoers data in LDAP. These changes were
   53: incorporated into Sudo 1.6.8.
   54: 
   55: New Parser
   56: 
   57: In 2005, Todd rewrote the sudoers parser to better support the features that
   58: had been added in the past ten years. This new parser removes some
   59: limitations of the previous one, removes ordering constraints and adds
   60: support for including multiple sudoers files.
   61: 
   62: Quest Sponsorship
   63: 
   64: In 2010, Quest Software began sponsoring Sudo development by hiring Todd to
   65: work on Sudo as part of his full-time job.
   66: 
   67: Present Day
   68: 
   69: Sudo, in its current form, is maintained by:
   70: 
   71:         Todd C. Miller <Todd.Miller@courtesan.com>
   72: 
   73: Todd continues to enhance sudo and fix bugs.
   74: