Heartbleed Rallies Tech Giants to Support Open Source Programs

A dozen of the world`s leading tech companies have joined forces to improve open source programs such as Open SSL after the notorious Heartbleed vulnerability, according to Business Spectator.

Amazon, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel and Microsoft are among the founding companies of the Core Infrastructure Initiative, a multi-million dollar project to invest in open source software vital for core computing functions.

Each company will donate $300,000 “to support development of OpenSSL as well as other pieces of open source software that make up critical parts of the world’s technology infrastructure, but whose programmers do not necessarily have adequate funding to support their work,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, the organizer of the project.

The tech industry was motivated to invest after the developers maintaining the Open SSL library said they`ve received only $2,000 yearly to maintain the code. Since Open SSL secures two thirds of the world`s websites, the Heartbleed encryption bug cost businesses millions of dollars and hours of productivity, as they were required to update to safer Open SSL versions.

Support will include funding for developers to work full time on the open source project, security audits, and computing and test infrastructure or travel expenses.