Quality Software Costs Money-Heartbleed Was Free

Poul-Henning Kamp, one of the primary developers of the FreeBSD operating system, discusses about the funding for Free and open source software (FOSS). One way to fund FOSS is simply to hire the FOSS maintainers, with the understanding they spend some amount of company time and resources on the project. Companies should add their support of FOSS to their lists of corporate social responsibilities, along with their sponsorships of local soccer teams and their funding of scholarships. Another way to fund FOSS is for software projects to set up foundations to collect money and hire developers. This is a relatively complex and expensive undertaking. The Varnish Moral License (VML) is not an ideal funding model in the sense that with a single exception, none of the big corporations that deliver massive amounts of HTTP traffic with Varnish has participated.