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sudo

=head1 A Brief History of Sudo:

=head3 The Early Years

Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff
Spencer around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at
SUNY/Buffalo.  It ran on a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD.  An updated
version, credited to Phil Betchel, Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips,
John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to the net.sources Usenet
newsgroup in December of 1985.

=head3 Sudo at CU-Boulder

In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version
of sudo.  For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful
of folks at CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and
Trent Hein.

=head3 Root Group Sudo

In 1991, Dave Hieb and Jeff Nieusma wrote a new version of sudo
with an enhanced sudoers format under contract to a consulting firm
called "The Root Group".  This version was later released under the
GNU public license.

=head3 CU Sudo

In 1994, after maintaining sudo informally within CU-Boulder for
some time, Todd C. Miller made a public release of "CU sudo" (version
1.3) with bug fixes and support for more operating systems.  The
"CU" was added to differentiate it from the "official" version from
"The Root Group".

In 1995, a new parser for the sudoers file was contributed by Chris
Jepeway.  The new parser was a proper grammar (unlike the old one)
and could work with both sudo and visudo (previously they had
slightly different parsers).

In 1996, Todd, who had been maintaining sudo for several years in
his spare time, moved distribution of sudo from a CU-Boulder ftp
site to his domain, courtesan.com.

=head3 Just Plain Sudo

In 1999, the "CU" prefix was dropped from the name since there had
been no formal release of sudo from "The Root Group" since 1991
(the original authors now work elsewhere).  As of version 1.6, Sudo
no longer contains any of the original "Root Group" code and is
available under an ISC-style license.

In 2001, the sudo web site, ftp site and mailing lists were moved
from courtesan.com to the sudo.ws domain (sudo.org was already
taken).

=head3 LDAP Integration

In 2003, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company contributed code written
by Aaron Spangler to store the sudoers data in LDAP.  These changes
were incorporated into Sudo 1.6.8.

=head3 New Parser

In 2005, Todd rewrote the sudoers parser to better support the
features that had been added in the past ten years.  This new parser
removes some limitations of the previous one, removes ordering
constraints and adds support for including multiple sudoers files.

=head3 Quest Sponsorship

In 2010, Quest Software began sponsoring Sudo development by hiring
Todd to work on Sudo as part of his full-time job.

=head3 Present Day

Sudo, in its current form, is maintained by:

	Todd C. Miller <Todd.Miller@courtesan.com>

Todd continues to enhance sudo and fix bugs.