If there’s one thing that can make the competitive tech industry band together, it’s security. Last month, the Heartbleed bug affected nearly everyone in the industry, requiring millions of customers to change their passwords and rethink the safety that their services provide them. The Wall Street Journal reports that several of the biggest tech firms on the planet are doing what they can to prevent the next Heartbleed by helping to pay the salaries of full-time employees and funding an audit for the OpenSSL Project.
If you’re unaware of the OpenSSL Project’s work, it is responsible for managing the code for many of the most common online encryption tools. The Linux Foundation will be taking charge of the funding initiative, but with money that has been donated by Google, Amazon, Dell, Facebook, IBM and others. Nokia, Huawei Technologies and Smartisan have also pledged $50,000 a year directly to OpenSSL.
“It’s not the way we would have chosen to get that recognition, but that has been the way it’s worked out,” said Steve Marquess, head of the OpenSSL Foundation. Marquess wouldn’t go into specifics about the payment the Foundation and its staff will receive, but he says that it’s “comparable to what people of that skill and experience level could reasonably get in the private sector.”
