US pays to make open source safer

From vnunet.com:

Open-source software may become more attractive to enterprises, after the US government last week pledged over $1m funding to help root out bugs in projects such as Linux, Mozilla and Apache.

Stanford University, Symantec and source-code testing company Coverity have all been signed up by the US Department of Homeland Security to trawl through open-source code and seek out bugs.

The $1m grant will be released over three years. A key element of the project is to improve the existing Coverity Prevent Linux code-testing tool, increasing the number of projects it supports to over 40 and creating a database of bugs for developers to view. Meanwhile, Symantec is on board to test the scanning tools.

From news.com:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is extending the scope of its protection to open-source software.

Through its Science and Technology Directorate, the department has given $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source code analysis, representatives for the three grant recipients told CNET News.com.

The Homeland Security Department grant will be paid over a three-year period, with $841,276 going to Stanford, $297,000 to Coverity and $100,000 to Symantec, according to San Francisco-based technology provider Coverity....

List of open-source software to be analyzed in the Department of Homeland Security-sponsored project.

Abiword
Apache
BerkeleyDB
Bind
Ethereal
Firebird
Firefox
FreeBSD
Gaim
Gimp
Gtk+
Icecast
Inetutils
KDE
Linux
Mplayer
MySQL
OpenBSD
OpenLDAP
OpenSSH
OpenSSL
OpenVPN
Proftpd
QT
Samba
Squid
TCL
TK
wxGtk
Xine
Xmms
Xpdf