alt Hacker NewsI've been working on a GUI task manager for Linux and I've been wanting to put a "Funding" or ownership meta data next to the process or process group in the view so people can know where the upstream code lives, how to support the project, and what organizational unit "owns" that process.
So I actually vibe coded a script that does this against a sqlite db I've been considering to bundle with my task manager so it can know this stuff on the fly.
But yea this is a key missing component in Linux user space. Windows let's you encode organizational stuff into an exe but on Linux binaries don't really have that.
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TingPing • today at 3:11 AM
It already exists, the appstream spec can associate binaries with metadata.
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You can usually get info about the upstream from the package metadata, e.g. on Debian:
The distribution model on Linux (generally speaking) is different from Windows, though, so I don't think it makes sense to view processes as fully "owned" by the upstream in the same way as on Windows. Instead of letting each individual organization directly have administrator access to rummage around on our machines and install packages, this is mostly delegated to the Linux distribution, which may customize the packages. (And of course the user has the right to customize the program as well, assuming it's FOSS, so ultimately the user is the owner of their own processes.)