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The European Union will foot the bill for bug bounty programs for 14 open source projects, EU Member of Parliament Julia Reda announced this week.
The 14 projects are, in alphabetical order, 7-zip, Apache Kafka, Apache Tomcat, Digital Signature Services (DSS), Drupal, Filezilla, FLUX TL, the GNU C Library (glibc), KeePass, midPoint, Notepad++, PuTTY, the Symfony PHP framework, VLC Media Player, and WSO2.
The bug bounty programs are being sponsored as part of the third edition of the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project.
EU authorities first approved FOSSA in 2015, after security researchers discovered a year earlier severe vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL library, an open source project used by many websites to support HTTPS connections.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Monday December 31 2018, @05:24PM (2 children)
Here's an example for you. Linux, that bastion of open source, after all these years and a constant stream of input from business, still has no standard GUI/API. You want to code a desktop application? Some installs will have the required widgetry, some won't; so you'll be packing your own. And when you do, there's no guarantee at all that the widgets you design or buy into will offer the user any consistency, because every other application has to do the same thing, pick one toolkit from many. Further, you could easily end up needing one that charges for the privilege of using it, which tends to lock out smaller developers from making a commercial attempt.
Yet both OS X and Windows offer standard, free, dependable APIs to powerful GUIs that are in the OS itself. You know why? Because they know that commercial software development is much more likely with this in place. But linux? They don't care about commercial developers.
And lo and behold: the number of companies that make commercial desktop linux applications is, again after all these years, very few. My graphics company looked into it quite seriously; the bottom line was, no, it wasn't a viable platform. We did the Amiga; we did the Mac; we did Windows. They all had actual proper stable GUIs that dependably worked across versions. Linux? No.
Even now, retired and more interested in writing freeware than going down the commercial road again, I code desktop applications for OS X and Windows, because the linux OS desktop environment is such a jumbled mess. Make no mistake, I certainly use linux; for web and database servers. These stacks are one of linux's strengths, and that's great. But as a platform for desktop applications... no.
And before you, or anyone else, starts in with the "but we can choose our desktops / widgets", yes, I know you can, and I'm truly happy that you're pleased with that, and even agree that it's cool in some ways. But the issue here is playing nice with business, and the choice to do things in this particular way is not, playing nice with business. Also, although it would even further multiply the various types of widgetry the user might encounter, there's no technical reason linux couldn't do both: have a standard GUI/API that was always there and freely available without compromise, and still leave the door open for custom desktops that could lay on their own stuff in addition.
This is one of the key reasons why linux has GIMP [gimp.org]; but not Photoshop [adobe.com] — linux isn't one atomic development target. It's a broad swath of them. Some of which, like Qt, are "pay to play" which is very hard on smaller developers, who are, after all, also businesses.
That's one solid example. Anything published with the GPL as its license is another, and in spades. I could go on, but I know from sad experience that would make no difference.
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Kleptomaniacs always take things literally.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 31 2018, @06:38PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:00AM
What are you even talking about? Linux is a kernel. Of course it doesn't have a GUI. It has a standard API, which is far better than the obfuscated pile of shit Windows has. If Windows had a half-decent API, Wine development wouldn't be such a pain as it is. Of course, Windows is strongly dependent on keeping their API as obtuse and secret as possible; if it were possible to easily run Windows software on other OSes, no one would ever use it.
Linux is mostly developed by companies. cgroups for example was written by Google engineers. Your very premise, that businesses don't play with FOSS, is wrong. Of course, your arguments trying to support your incorrect premise are also wrong, or at least nonsensical or non sequitur. What are you really trying to say, that FOSS software does not currently support your own needs so you feel like you need to badmouth the entire ecosystem?
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