The Heartbleed bug revealed that some important open source projects were so understaffed that they were unable to properly implement best security practices. The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative , formed to help open source projects have the ability to adopt these practices, uses a lot of carrot and very little stick.
Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.
OpenOffice, if you’ll remember, was forked by a group of developers who had been frustrated for years by roadblocks to what they saw as necessary development by Sun Microsystems, which had created the open source project out of Star Office, a proprietary suite it purchased in the late 1990s. When the situation worsened after Oracle took ownership, the developers created The Document Foundation, forked OpenOffice and released it as LibreOffice under the GPL. Improvements became evident right away, with much of the early work centering on cleaning up the bloated code base.
Let’s forget for a minute that I have plenty of reasons for seeing Redmond as a continuing threat to free tech. Let’s forget the patent issues the company still uses as a threat, as well as the fact that all of its contributions to open source are to support Azure and Windows, the latter of which remains proprietary and definitely not free software. Let’s also forget that this love of Linux was announced when Microsoft began betting on the cloud, where embracing Linux became necessary for survival. Can you imagine a Windows only cloud service? Neither can I.
