Not everyone is completely satisfied with the growth in use of open source software. The Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. is apparently quite concerned over security, to the point where they want things fixed - to the tune of a $1.24Million grant to various institutions such as Standford University, which will be receiving the bulk of the money. And, interestingly enough. Symantec Corp. The grant is to promote development and improvement of OSS in general, though throwing money at things doesn't always get them done better. However, at least the concern is there, with security being perhaps the most important topic for the Internet today.
"The DHS is realizing that more and more of our nation's critical software infrastructure is being run on top of open source," Coverity Vice President for Marketing and Business Development David Park told LinuxInsider. "There's a feeling that there must be a hardening of these software projects to make them more reliable and secure," he said.
Coverity will be doing code audits of some very popular software, such as the world's most widely used web server, Apache, the infamous Firefox, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Samba, MySQL and others. Some have taken exception to how the DHS is choosing to divvy their funding. However, one thing is for sure, and that is that the further development of free, secure software is important to many. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the future of the software being targeted.