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sudo

    1: =head1 A Brief History of Sudo:
    2: 
    3: =head3 The Early Years
    4: 
    5: Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff
    6: Spencer around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at
    7: SUNY/Buffalo.  It ran on a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD.  An updated
    8: version, credited to Phil Betchel, Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips,
    9: John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to the net.sources Usenet
   10: newsgroup in December of 1985.
   11: 
   12: =head3 Sudo at CU-Boulder
   13: 
   14: In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version
   15: of sudo.  For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful
   16: of folks at CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and
   17: Trent Hein.
   18: 
   19: =head3 Root Group Sudo
   20: 
   21: In 1991, Dave Hieb and Jeff Nieusma wrote a new version of sudo
   22: with an enhanced sudoers format under contract to a consulting firm
   23: called "The Root Group".  This version was later released under the
   24: GNU public license.
   25: 
   26: =head3 CU Sudo
   27: 
   28: In 1994, after maintaining sudo informally within CU-Boulder for
   29: some time, Todd C. Miller made a public release of "CU sudo" (version
   30: 1.3) with bug fixes and support for more operating systems.  The
   31: "CU" was added to differentiate it from the "official" version from
   32: "The Root Group".
   33: 
   34: In 1995, a new parser for the sudoers file was contributed by Chris
   35: Jepeway.  The new parser was a proper grammar (unlike the old one)
   36: and could work with both sudo and visudo (previously they had
   37: slightly different parsers).
   38: 
   39: In 1996, Todd, who had been maintaining sudo for several years in
   40: his spare time, moved distribution of sudo from a CU-Boulder ftp
   41: site to his domain, courtesan.com.
   42: 
   43: =head3 Just Plain Sudo
   44: 
   45: In 1999, the "CU" prefix was dropped from the name since there had
   46: been no formal release of sudo from "The Root Group" since 1991
   47: (the original authors now work elsewhere).  As of version 1.6, Sudo
   48: no longer contains any of the original "Root Group" code and is
   49: available under an ISC-style license.
   50: 
   51: In 2001, the sudo web site, ftp site and mailing lists were moved
   52: from courtesan.com to the sudo.ws domain (sudo.org was already
   53: taken).
   54: 
   55: =head3 LDAP Integration
   56: 
   57: In 2003, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company contributed code written
   58: by Aaron Spangler to store the sudoers data in LDAP.  These changes
   59: were incorporated into Sudo 1.6.8.
   60: 
   61: =head3 New Parser
   62: 
   63: In 2005, Todd rewrote the sudoers parser to better support the
   64: features that had been added in the past ten years.  This new parser
   65: removes some limitations of the previous one, removes ordering
   66: constraints and adds support for including multiple sudoers files.
   67: 
   68: =head3 Quest Sponsorship
   69: 
   70: In 2010, Quest Software began sponsoring Sudo development by hiring
   71: Todd to work on Sudo as part of his full-time job.
   72: 
   73: =head3 Present Day
   74: 
   75: Sudo, in its current form, is maintained by:
   76: 
   77: 	Todd C. Miller <Todd.Miller@courtesan.com>
   78: 
   79: Todd continues to enhance sudo and fix bugs.