The biggest technology companies have joined forces, creating an initiative that will try to prevent the emergence of a new security gap, as was the recent heartbleed.
More specifically, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Qualcomm, Rockspace and VMware created the "Core Infrastructure Initiative", An initiative to fund and support open source software developers.
The announcement was made by the non-profit Linux Foundation, which was also responsible for its organization. The amount to be contributed by each of the participants was not announced, but in a report Reuters sets the amount that each company will allocate to 300.000 dollars.
The money that will be gathered will support the development of secure open source software, a key component of the Internet and technological development.
As Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, says, many of the creators of such applications do not have the necessary funding to support their work.
It's worth noting that Heartbleed was one of the biggest security breaches in Internet history. The problem was created by a single line of code in the OpenSSL open architecture software, which 66% of the web relies on servers for data encryption.
The security loophole in OpenSSL essentially meant that cryptographic keys, which ensure that all "secret" passwords and passwords of users are transmitted securely, could be intercepted by a web server, without being noticed. The Heartbleed bug existed in OpenSSL for more than two years before it was noticed and publicly announced.
