Heartbleed Bug Prompts Tech Giants To Donate $3.6 Million To Support Open-Source Projects

by Laurie Sullivan , April 24, 2014

A dozen technology companies -- including Intel, IBM, Facebook, and Google -- have stepped up to pledge $3.6 million to help maintain under-funded open-source software projects that are important to the global computing infrastructure supported by OpenSSL.

Some argue that a hole in the OpenSSL architecture, which exposed password and other user data, could have been avoided with broader financial backing. Now a group of major technology companies have teamed up with the Linux Foundation to strengthen support.

The companies include Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Rackspace, and VMware. Along with the Linux Foundation, the companies have created the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII).

Although OpenSSL has become the first project under consideration to receive funds, it's not the only one. The group will identify open-source projects in need of financing and provide funding. It also will finance security audits, hardware and software infrastructure, travel, and more.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, explained that the funding will now support additional developers to work full-time supporting open-source projects.

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1 comment about "Heartbleed Bug Prompts Tech Giants To Donate $3.6 Million To Support Open-Source Projects".

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Andrew Stuart from Bidness, April 24, 2014 at 7:13 p.m.
That's great of course but the lack of funding wasn't a cause of Heartbleed or even necessarily much of a factor. Heartbleed was a boneheaded coding error followed by a lack of inspection. It's actually similar to the Gotofail bug at Apple. That too was a ludicrous bug in SSL code. But the iOS development was funded by a tech giant.http://bit.ly/1lQnkKJ
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