14 DAY TRIAL // Today, May 3, 2016, Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Linux and open source projects, has announced the general availability of its free badge program.
Dubbed CII Best Practices Badges, the free badge program has been created by Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) project. Its main goal is determining the security, stability, and quality and various open source software projects, and among the first to earn these badges are the well-known Linux kernel, OpenSSL, Node.js, GitLab, cURL, Zephyr, and OpenBlox.
"Open source projects often have very good security practices in place but need a way to validate those against industry and community best practices and ensure they’re always improving," said Nicko van Sommeren, Chief Technology Officer at The Linux Foundation. "Thanks to the generous contributions by the Core Infrastructure Initiative supporters, we’re able to provide this program to educate developers on security best practices and provide a directory for developers and CIOs to understand what projects have an understanding and methodology that focuses on security."
More open source projects will earn the security-focused badge
The fact of the matter is that this is not actually news for us, as Linux Foundation first informed the community about the development of its security-focused badge program for open source software projects last year in August. It was then that they sought the open source community's opinion on the matter, especially about the criteria to be used, which at that moment was published as a draft on the popular GitHub project hosting service.
In today's press release, attached below for reference, Linux Foundation notes that its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) project, which has been created with the main goal of enabling respected software developers, technology companies, as well as industry stakeholders to collaboratively identify important open source projects that need funding, is now a multimillion-dollar project supported by big names like Google, Amazon, Cisco, etc.