The White House convened a meeting between some of tech's biggest players Thursday to discuss how the security of open-source software could be improved.
In short: There’s clearly room for improvement and, thankfully, attendees of the recent White House meetingfairly amenable to it. At the meeting, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan apparently called open-source software a “key national security issue.” Similarly, Google’s President of Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walkerto the company blog on Thursday arguing that he wanted to see better support for the open-source community.
“For too long, the software community has taken comfort in the assumption that open-source software is generally secure due to its transparency and the assumption that ‘many eyes’ were watching to detect and resolve problems,” said Walker. “But in fact, while some projects do have many eyes on them, others have few or none at all.
What exactly the government and other members of Big Tech have in mind for better open-source security isn’t entirely clear at this point, but the fact that they’re talking about it seems like a good sign.