Immediately after having many sleep less nights because of the recently discovered Heartbleed bug, The Linux Foundation has come up with the “Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII)” to raise money to fund critical open source projects. Companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon any few others have already come forward to support this initiative. Many others are expected to join this group.
There are lot of critical open source projects like OpenSSL, which every company uses, but lack the needed financial support. I was shocked to hear that an important project like OpenSSL receives only around $2000 annually in donations and there is no developer who works full time on this.
To avoid the next Heartbleed, more than money, these open source projects need dedicated developers and testers working full time. Hopefully CII will raise enough money to support all the critical OSS projects and fund the development.
If you consume a lot of open source projects and have deep pockets, feel free to donate for this noble cause. Let me know your thoughts on avoiding the next Heartbleed in the comments below.
If you haven’t heard of the Heartbleed bug, I have explained it in detail in another post.