From EnterpriseTech: I came across a link today to a news commentary which asserts that open source software is “a supply chain rife with security vulnerabilities and clogged with outdated versions of widely used software components.” I’m often reluctant to give these types of stories too much air time, because they’re often rife with FUD, but there’s a lot of truth here, and it’s something that we need to face up to, especially if we want companies to continue to innovate on open source platforms and build open source products.
If you read Nadia Eghbal‘s “Roads and Bridges” white paper for the Ford Foundation, you’ll see that crusty, old open source software has been a concern for some time. She proposes that we view software the same as any other core infrastructure, such as roads and bridges. There’s also a collaborate project from the Linux Foundation, the Core Infrastructure Initiative, to attempt to deal with these issues.
This is not an easy problem to solve, and it hits at the hears of what we want to do at the Open Source Entrepreneur Network, because we want companies to build process around their consumption and contribution of this great open source software and make contingency plans for when it all goes haywire. We want companies to be able to reduce their risk exposure while still benefiting from the innovation happening right now on open source platforms.
