LinuxPlanet: How Relevant is the Homeland Security Grant?

“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…?”

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