For years, developers of free, open-source software have been telling anyone who will listen that their projects needs better financial assistance and more oversight. The federal government and Silicon Valley may finally be listening after a number of disastrous incidents involving open-source code.
Executives from some of the tech sector's biggest companies met with administration officials at the White House on Thursday to discuss the need for better security in the open-source community. The list of attendees included some of the biggest names in technology.
Open-source software is free, publicly inspectable, and can be used by anyone. Big corporations use open-source tools for development purposes because of how useful they are. Open-source projects need oversight and funding to remain secure, but they don't always get it. For years, open-source developers have complained that their software needs better support from Big Tech and other institutional actors.
The White House is having a meeting right now. The Apache logging library log4j was found to have a bug a month or so ago. The troubled program led to widespread panic in the tech industry, as companies scrambled to patch the systems and products that relied upon the library for success. The Apache Software Foundation was also present at the meeting.
The Log4j debacle is not the only open-source debacle. The creator of two widely used software tools decided last week to inexplicably disabled them with a number of bizarre software updates. Thousands of other software projects that relied on the popular jаvascript libraries Faker and Colors were taken down by the man behind them.
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