14 DAY TRIAL // OSVDB, or the Open Sourced Vulnerability Database, a website that indexed and archived software vulnerabilities, has decided to shut down after collecting over 100,000 vulnerabilities.
The announcement came yesterday, and the database was immediately taken down, all links redirecting to the site's blog. In their brief statement, the site's administrators point out the site won't be coming back.
"We are not looking for anyone to offer assistance at this point, and it will not be resurrected in its previous form," Brian Martin, OSVDB administrator, said. "This was not an easy decision, and several of us struggled for well over ten years trying to make it work at great personal expense. The industry simply did not want to contribute and support such an effort."
The OSVDB domain will remain standing, and the team says their blog will continue to be a place for providing thoughts and opinions on security-related topics, and especially software vulnerabilities.
Before it abruptly shut down, the site had managed to rack up over 106,000 vulnerabilities in over 83,000 products from over 10,000 vendors.
The Open Sourced Vulnerability Database launched in 2004 and was guided by the Open Security Foundation (OSF), a non-profit organization established the following year.
OSVDB's goal was to provide vendor-independent software vulnerability assessments, with all the information under an open source license, free for everyone.