A Brief history of sudo(8): 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 newsgroup in December of 1985. In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released and 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. 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. In 1994, after maintaining sudo informally within CU-Boulder for some time, Todd 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 1996, Todd, who had been maintaining sudo for several years in his spare time, brought sudo development under the umbrella of his consulting firm, Courtesan Consulting. Courtesan remains committed to a free sudo and is sponsoring another sudo rewrite as well as continued development of the sudo 1.x code base. In 1999, the "CU" prefix was dropped from the name since there has 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 with a BSD-style license. In 2004, Todd incorporated as GratiSoft, Inc. to provide commercial support and enhancements to the sudo community. sudo, in its current form, is maintained by: Todd Miller <Todd.Miller@courtesan.com> Todd continues to enhance sudo and fix bugs.