"When the code-analysis firm Coverity announced that it, along with Stanford University and Symantec, were recipients of a Department of Homeland Security grant to improve the code of open source software projects, the expected jokes and critiques flew fast and furious.
"Wags promoted ideas such as color-coded bug reports and airport-style searches for faulty code. More serious criticisms were leveled at the idea of the grant, since many in the US are still judging the DHS (in particular its subsidiary agency FEMA) harshly for its performance during and after Hurricane Katrina. On the opposite side of the perception argument, the funding seems to be free of any direct DHS management, which seemed to quell much of the criticism.
"But even given a neutral stance by the US government agency, a few questions still remain. How exactly is this money going to be used, who are all the players, and what is the nature of their relationship with existing open source projects...?"
