The chaos that Heartbleed bug braught revealed how much the web relies on OpenSSL software, and how little was being spent to maintain it. But now, some of the biggest players in tech are coming together to change that, and hopefully spot the next Heartbleed before it can wreak quite much destruction.
The new project the Core Infrastructure Initiative, formed by the Linux Foundation and devoted to plowing money into the critical software infrastructure that needs it. According to executive director Jim Zemlin " After we're done updating our software and swapping our certificates, what can we learn? What can be done differently," he says. "Obviously, in retrospect, I wish we had done this a long time ago."
Zemlin describes the role of Linux Foundation " a place to hold the money " while the members decide where it needs to go. Those members include giants like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, along with hardware companies like Intel and Fujitsu, and cloud services groups like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services. Each one is committed to donating at least $100,000 a year for the next three years. With twelve companies already on board, that means the company has already amassed $3.6 million in funding to be doled out as the project progresses.
Zemlin says, five years from now when we look back " we'll say one of the things we learned was how important it is to have these decisions proactively."
