US Homeland Security to Support Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "CNET is reporting that the US Department of Homeland Security is extending its support to open source software. The DHS will be giving Stanford University, Coverity, and Symantec a $1.24 million grant to improve the security of open source software. From the article: '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, which plans to announce the award publicly on Wednesday.' It's nice that our tax dollars are being used for the right stuff."

Not necessarily so...

[meringuoid]

I understand that most open source is written by people who care and are either college students or white collar workers who have time either at work (employer consenting), or at home if they have little family life.

Most open source, in terms of sheer number of projects or lines of code? Probably. But in terms of usage?

The major open-source projects have got corporate backing now. Linux, for instance? Lots of work being done on that by IBM, in addition to the employees of the likes of Red Hat or SuSE. Similarly, I believe AOL has been backing Mozilla lately, and the number of old-skool Unix utilities that contain copyrights of the University of California is enormous - after all, they wrote BSD.

It's not just anarchist hackers now. Open source has gone commercial in a really big way.

Why "Flamebait"?

[IAAP]

We've all have heard [nationalreview.com] about the wasteful spending by states and municipalites regarding the spending of money thrust upon them by Homeland Security. It's a matter that concerns both sides - a little. Homeland Security has become yet another avenue for pork barrel spending, and as a result, states are getting money that may not help the fight on terrorism. Senate [senate.gov]

At least the department of homaland security isn't wasteing all of thier money.

I agree. This will promote OSS and help reduce the costs of our Government. So what's the problem with what the parent said?

Re:Err wait a second.

[IAAP]

FTFA: Programmers working on the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, BIND Internet infrastructure software and Firefox browser, for example, will be able to fix security vulnerabilities flagged by the system before their code becomes part of a released application or operating system.

And: This could be a boon for open-source security, said Stacey Quandt, an analyst with Aberdeen Group. "The benefit for open source is that it enables it to be up to date with commercial technology innovation," she said.

Your point FTFA"Why does the DHS think it is worthwhile to pay for bugs to be found, but has made no provision to pay for them to be fixed?"

I agree that it's kind of shitty that money isn't going to OSS. Then again, they're getting free security checking that'll can be applied and distributed for free. Hopefully, someone in Gov. will see the light and spend some money on OSS to have the security holes fixed. Donations to th OSS organizations affected by the screening?

revisionism

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't even get past your *first point* before noticing a glaringly obvious lie of ommission.

"1979
November 4
Iranian radicals seize the US Embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six American diplomats hostage. The crisis continues until 20 January 1981 when the hostages are released by diplomatic means."

You seem to have left out a little bogus prior art by the US/UK axis of maximum profits. Intentional? I would guess yes due to your taking the time to write or copy such a long piece.

  I will give a very short Cliff's Notes reply now.

    Iran had a democratically elected leader who wanted more of the oil profits to benefit Iran's people. whoops! This didn't fly with the oil goons, so they organized a coup complete with terrorist bombings and assasinations and had the shah of iran imposed on the people there. Eventually, his police state apparatus (SAVAK, no different from any other organized group of tortureres) got to be too much for the bulk of the folks in Iran, basically all the same stuff saddam was accused of lately, making it easy for islamic fundies to organize resistance. Extremely easy really. The shah gets sick and has to leave the nation to go get treatment, by that time the ayatollah khomeni was able to just walk in and take over. They seized those embassies looking for evidence of crimes against Iran by the shah and us intel agencies, and despite frantic shredding efforts by the US personnel, were able to carefully piece together shredded documents to *completely* prove their point to the international community. They had every right to do so, the US/UK oil and arms folks had openly declared war against the Iranina people with their installation of the Shah. In the meantime, over the next several months, US elections were getting ready, Carter tried a hostage rescue attempt but it failed due to technical reasons with the planes and helicopters and some bad luck due to weather and sandstorms, etc. The republicans in the background were shipping arms around the world and smuggling cocaine to fund the projects. They had a secret initiative directly to the "bad guy" mullahs and supplied them with replacement parts and additional arms, in exchange for them delaying release of the US hostages until AFTER the election, helping to insure a Reagan win, and pappy Bush, CIA honcho at the time, was in this up to his eyeballs. Then reagan gets in with pappy as VP (after more shenanigans at the convention to get pappy the VP nod, another story there on massive corruption and threats), then later he becomes prez. Oh ya, before that, a brainwashed young friend of the shrub crime family tried to whack Reagan when he was getting too uppity.

And so on.

I'll give you an A for effort on re arranging history to try and prove a point, but a D for content and an F for intentionally misleading people. I could go right down the list and point out quite a few instances of revisionism and ommission in your historical review of events and who "the bad guys" are. the US and UK combined corporate/intel/governmental goons have completely bloody and evil hands, it's not just all these other people deciding to attack western interests completely unprovoked. The amount of dictators installed and supported by these places intel agencies is in the dozens in the last century, and their victims are in the MILLIONS.

You can fool some of the people, but a lot of us have been covering this / researching this for decades and are completely hip to your FUD and disinformation campaigns.