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Linux Foundation: Bugs Can Be Made Shallow With Proper Funding
jones_supa writes The record amount of security challenges in 2014 undermined the confidence many had in high quality of open source software. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, addressed the issue head-on during last week's Linux Collaboration Summit. Zemlin quoted the oft-repeated Linus' law, which states that given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. "In these cases the eyeballs weren't really looking", Zemlin said. "Modern software security is hard because modern software is very complex," he continued. Such complexity requires dedicated engineers, and thus the solution is to fund projects that need help. To date, the foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative has helped out the NTP, OpenSSL and GnuPG projects, with more likely to come. The second key initiative is the Core Infrastructure Census, which aims to find the next Heartbleed before it occurs. The census is looking to find underfunded projects and those that may not have enough eyeballs looking at the code today."
I've been using Linux for an awfully long time, since the mid 1990s (Yggdrasil, then Debian). Over time, as Linux has gotten more and funding, it has gotten worse and worse. I initially switched to Linux because it generally just worked, and it worked better than many of the alternatives. But now it's just getting fucking horrible. I mean, look at systemd. Normal users, and especially power users, don't want it. It just causes problem after problem for many people. Yet we have corporate interests and corporate-funded developers forcing it on us, even forcing it into community-oriented distros like Debian. GNOME and Firefox are other great examples of community-based open source projects that got co-opted by money and ruined, to the most recent versions of both being almost totally unusable. On the other hand, we see projects that get less commercial interest, like Slackware and Xfce, producing the most usable and reliable open source software systems around. Linux was better when there wasn't so much money floating around. Back then it was about creating great software, and doing things right. Now it's about everything but that.