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Richard Stallman, su, and the 'wheel' group (2004)

I’m sure this is old news to those familiar with the unix-like operating systems and Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, but I just recently stumbled across the reason why the GNU version of su does not support the common wheel group. Taken from this website: (This section is by Richard Stallman.) Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest.

I’m sure this is old news to those familiar with the unix-like operating systems and Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, but I just recently stumbled across the reason why the GNU version of su does not support the common wheel group. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn’t know how to do that in Unix.)

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