Help Make Open Source Secure (The Mozilla Blog)

[Posted June 10, 2016 by jake]

On The Mozilla blog, Chris Riley announces the "Secure Open Source" (SOS) fund to provide money to help with the security of open-source software. "The SOS Fund will provide security auditing, remediation, and verification for key open source software projects. The Fund is part of the Mozilla Open Source Support program (MOSS) and has been allocated $500,000 in initial funding, which will cover audits of some widely-used open source libraries and programs. But we hope this is only the beginning. We want to see the numerous companies and governments that use open source join us and provide additional financial support. We challenge these beneficiaries of open source to pay it forward and help secure the Internet. Security is a process. To have substantial and lasting benefit, we need to invest in education, best practices, and a host of other areas. Yet we hope that this fund will provide needed short-term benefits and industry momentum to help strengthen open source projects." SOS sounds similar in scope to the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) set up by the Linux Foundation.

Help Make Open Source Secure (The Mozilla Blog)

Posted Jun 13, 2016 13:49 UTC (Mon) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link] (1 responses)

The truth is that if Linus Torvalds had asked for a grand for creating Linux, he would have been denied it, because, as the over-cited Steves Jobs said, consumers want THINGS THAT THEY CAN UNDERSTAND, MORE AND CHEAPER. The same with grants. If You offer anything truly novel, people will not understand its value before it is at least somewhat complete. That eliminates the ability to get grants for the truly good stuff, but the only reason anybody would need grant at all is to cover the costs of the development work.

The moral of the story: anybody, who wants to do something technically really good and awesome in this world needs to finance all of the work from his own pocket or from the pockets of people, who just believe in You, in Ventur Capitalist terms, the 3F, the Friends-Family-and-Fools.

In that respect the "spray-and-pray" investment strategy has the highest probability of hitting a sweet spot. For both, Venture Capitalists, and for philanthropists.

Help Make Open Source Secure (The Mozilla Blog)

Posted Jun 13, 2016 19:22 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

I don't agree with you.

It's true that the general public cannot be expected to figure out whether this sort of work is a good idea when making funding decisions, but that's fine because Mozilla isn't expecting the general public to make these decisions.