I had no idea this issue had been identified. While I find this tool very useful, the project is seeming rather questionable to me now.
I was bored at work one day. I decided to put a nyan cat easter egg in my company’s app. If at the loading progress bar screen you typed NYAN it would turn the progress bar into a rainbow being created by a little nyan cat while playing the nyan cat song. The mp3 (inconspicuously renamed without the extension) doubled our build size. No one batted an eye cause no one paid attention to the build size much.
Fast forward 5 years later, at a different job, I get a phone call from the old boss. Do you happen to know anything about this nyan cat file we found?
I had no idea what he was talking about.
After I saw that issue, I attempted to build Ventoy from source. After making numerous modifications and getting only the first couple components built, I got tired of it and quit. I’ve made some modifications to glim and use that instead, although it’s still not as easy as Ventoy. But I don’t trust Ventoy if I can’t build it myself.
Further, when @vkc@linuxmom.net made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them. That pushed me from not trusting Ventoy to actively distrusting it.
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. “Just fork it bro” is never helpful.
For me the problem is more in GPL violation: they distribute blobs under GPL3, user made a request of the source code by creating an issue, but they ignored that request. It is not only about “you have to fix it” versus “just fork it” imo.
Licence doesn’t apply to the creator.
He already owns the copyright, he doesn’t need a licence, he doesn’t need to adhere to the gpl
The binaries in question are various GNU and FOSS tools from elsewhere, not part of the Ventoy project itself. So no, the Ventoy author does not own the copyright of the tools in question.
Even then, he’s still allowed to provide binary blobs. He doesn’t have to provide it as source code. If that was the case, we’d all have to build from source and package managers like apt, dnf and flatpak wouldn’t exist.
All he has to do is make the source code available, i.e. just link back to the original Github Repo.
Seriously this. Any comment about a complicated system that starts with “just” can be ignored 99% of the time.
Also, there are 4k forks of Ventoy already. Obviously forking it isn’t helping. Actual work needs to be done.
I agree that comments like that are unhelpful/unnecessary, but how is that “for their own benefit”? Other than the actual devs themselves using that as a way to just ignore issues, I do not follow
It makes them feel good and devalues the quality of discussion. Benefits them, harms others.
Hey guys open source is great you can look at all the code and therefore there are no security backdoors etc. Also here are a bunch of pre-compiled blobs in the repo, don’t worry about those, but they are required to run the program.
The fact that people know there are pre-compiled blobs in open source means they have an informed reason to avoid the software!
Glad it’s getting a little more light. Been trying to tell people this for a few years now lol. It’s the reason I’ve stayed away from it since first learning of the tool and looking at the “source code”.
Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.
Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I’m thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.
As a wise one once said: “Talk is cheap, send patches”
Little did they know that Patches the Cat bit through their LAN lines and actually increased the cost of their communication.
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Good ol’ disk destroyer
I never trusted it because I thought it was completely proprietary. Well now I know it basically is.
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Any alternatives to this tool? I’ve used it a lot lately because I was testing out live OSes before installing one to the hard drive, but otherwise I don’t need it on a daily basis.
I guess, you could buy a handful of USB sticks…
Time for a fork, then?
What does BLOB stand for?
They even made a movie about it!
I’ve had too many issues with Ventoy that I’d rather just use fedora media writer or balenaetcher for when that doesn’t work. I mean honestly it’s a bit gimmicky, even if it’s a cool concept. I believe Glim and some other options exist too
Need to compare hashes between a stock ISO and one
flashedbooted by Ventoy (dd the latter to a file and check)Is BLOB an acronym?
Nope, but it has become a backronym https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage#Origins
Cool thanks :)
