It was written as part of my work.

check your contract, you might not own the code and your organization may have a process to determine how to license something.

to your other questions (IANAL)

1. prior work wont be licensed, meaning no one but the owner of the work is allowed to do anything with versions prior to the license
2. you don’t have to, but i can’t see a reason why you should not.
3. GPL might mean that other work depending on gpl licensed code has to be licensed in a gpl compatible way, depending on how exactly you depend on it and how you distribute your dependencies. MIT/BSD is easier here, if you don’t plan to license everything with the GPL anyway.

no, the solution is not to pay someone to have someone to blame if shit happens.

there are a bus load of people involved on the way from a git repo to actuall stuff running on a machine and everyone in that chain is responsible to have an eye on what stuff they are building/packaging/installing/running and if something seems off, it’s their responsibility to investigate and communicate with each other.

attacks like this will not be solved by paying someone to read source code, because the code in the repo might not be what is going to run on a machine or might look absolutely fine in a vacuum or will be altered by some other part in the chain. and even if you have dedicated code readers, you cant be sure that they are not compromised or that their findings will reach the people running/packaging/depending on the software.

i can’t see how paying someone would have changed anything in this scenario.

this seems to be a long running campaign to get someone into a position where they could introduce malicious code. the only thing different would have been that the bad actor would have been paid by someone.

this is not to say, that people working on foss should not be paid. if anything we need more people actively reviewing code and release artifacts even if they are not a contributor or maintainer of a piece of software.

Most clients are web browsers and support for torrents in http is the same as for every other file.

So that would only give us a use for torrents as a form of content distribution plattform to get the actual files closer to the client.

In cases where we have actual non browser clients: i like to curate what i am distributing and don’t want to distribute anything i happen stumble upon or would you be willing to store and more importantly share everything you find on 4chan or that might show up in your mastodon feed?

Maybe you could afford breakfast, if you would spent less on your fancy attire!

https://jsommers.github.io/cbook/cbook.pdf

Might be a good way for someone who is familiar with a higher level language.

Than there is of course “The C Programming Language” by Ritchie and Kernighan and “advanced programming in the unix enviroment” by stevens and rago.

So, i’d guess just get your feet wet with small stuff. Find out how to take arguments from the command line, or read a file, maybe programm a simple guess the number game. After you are more familiar with the syntax and so on you could look into using your c code in a higher level language. For python you’d have to look into ctypes for that.