U.S. IT companies raise funds for open source software projects

The recently exposed "heart bleeding" vulnerability in OpenSSL, the network security protocol, has made the security of such open source software projects questionable. The U.S. Linux Foundation and several well-known technology companies have recently announced the establishment of a core infrastructure plan to provide funding and support for open source software projects.

The 12 technology companies currently participating in the core infrastructure program include Amazon, Cisco, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell, and IBM. They will jointly identify open source software projects that need help and provide funding support, such as funding full-time developers, security inspections, computing and testing infrastructure. Each company promised to provide $100,000 per year for the plan over the next three years.

The serious shortage of developers and funds is considered to be an important reason for the weakened reliability of OpenSSL. The first project this core infrastructure plan will fund is OpenSSL. Key developers will receive funding support and other resources to improve the security of this software, encourage peer review, and increase responsiveness to patching needs.

OpenSSL, a group of open source network encryption tools, was exposed last month as a "bleeding heart" vulnerability that raised security concerns in the global Internet industry. At the same time, industry insiders and the media have noticed that only one full-time employee and several volunteers who maintain this open source project receive only about US$2,000 in donations per year. Most of the companies that use the open source software for free don’t pay back. .

The so-called open source software is software that is open to source code and freely available to anyone, and is usually developed, maintained, and updated by a group of volunteers. Representative software of the open source project Linux computer operating system is now widely used in the world's supercomputers, servers, financial transactions, and Android phones. The development and maintenance of open source projects is becoming more and more complex, but some open source projects have not received support commensurate with their importance.

The Linux Foundation, which is responsible for organizing and managing the core infrastructure plan, said that they have been funding Linux founder Linus Torvalds devoted himself to system development. Now he also hopes to help more developers and maintenance staff full-time support for other. Open source project.