Several companies made announcements at the Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver. For example, AWS revealed how it contributes to the open source community, Meta joined the OpenJS Foundation and OpenSSF received financial support from Google and Microsoft.
AWS announced two major news items. It released the Cedar programming language and SDK as open-source. Cedar is useful for granting applications permissions with understandable policies. It supports secure role-based access control (RBAC) and is developed with verification-guided development, which ensures Cedar is bug-free. AWS hopes this will promote innovation in access management.
In addition, it released a new open-source framework called Snapchange. It is designed for fuzzing, or the automatic testing of software with unusual inputs. This often uncovers vulnerabilities in software. Snapchange is written in Rust and allows developers to replay physical memory snapshots in a KVM virtual machine.
Contributions
The OpenSSF foundation received contributions of $2.5 million (nearly €2.3 million) from Microsoft and Google. Additionally, Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, Salesforce and SAP joined.
Big tech’s contributions to open source don’t stop there. For instance, Meta became a Gold member of the OpenJS Foundation, which supports the open-source community around JavaScript. SD Times notes that Meta already has many projects running in the JavaScript community, including last year’s open-source testing framework Jest.
AI Everywhere
AI was a major topic at the Open Source Summit in Vancouver. This raised an important question for the open source community: can open source projects comply with upcoming legislation from the EU and beyond? However, a leaked memo from a Google engineer gave hope for open source: open coding is said to be winning the battle against the large language models from OpenAI and Google.
