Should open source projects care about getting CVE IDs? Only if you want to. But it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Even if you don’t care about CVEs, someone else will. And both situations are OK. I think there’s ways to work with this. But first a story about rats. This is sort of the part two from my other blog post Dear Open Source Developers: It’s OK not to embargo ...
Something really important just happened with vulnerability disclosure and open source. No, it’s not PHP and that dumpster fire of a week. I speak of something Curl just did that probably won’t make the news anywhere because to most people it won’t really make sense. Curl just announced that all low and medium security reports should go into the public issue tracker instead of being privately reported curl vulnerability disclosure policy ...
Josh chats with Erik Möller from the Sovereign Tech Agency about what they’re doing. The Sovereign Tech Agency is doing some amazing work around funding open source maintainers and projects. Eric breaks down what they’re doing, how it works, and how you can apply for funding. We even learn about some similar projects happening in the EU. Hopefully in the near future we will see the work Sovereign Tech Agency is doing happening in every country. ...
Josh chats with James from e18e. This is a project that is working on improving Javascript packages by cleaning up, speeding up, and leveling up the dependencies. The way the e18e project handles this work is very human open source. It’s all about building up connections and trust with the package communities, which is no small effort. James fills us in on what they’re doing as well as how we can get involved. It’s a truly amazing effort ...
2026 has been a wild year. There are more vulnerabilities than anyone can count. We seem to keep talking about the number itself instead of things like how we got here or what we’re going to do about it, which is neat. The number of attacks against open source is basically an uncountable mess. Also very neat. And the cherry on top of this poop sundae is number of companies that have promised us they are going to “fix” open source, and when they use the word fix they really mean sell you a solution for a problem they mostly made up. Very cool, very cool. ...
Josh welcomes Josh Marpet for a discussion about abandoned open source packages. Josh Marpet has a foundation called Value Chain Risk Institute that has a report discussion how to start measuring if an open source package might be abandoned. There’s a lot of data, but not a lot of groups using that data to help make informed decisions about using open source. VCRI is one of those places that’s starting to do this. ...
Josh welcomes Mo Duffy from Red Hat to chat about project Lightwell. The idea is to leverage the resources and understanding Red Hat has built up over the years to help deal with the deluge of vulnerability reports that are overwhelming open source projects. Mo does a really good job of explaining why this is fundamentally a people problem, not a technology problem. But it’s a people problem we can probably use technology to help. It will be interesting to see where Lightwell goes in the next few years. ...
Josh welcomes Jordi Boggiano the lead maintainer of Composer and Packagist to explain the truckload of security features they’ve recently added. Packagist is the PHP package registry, Composer is the dependency manager for PHP. Recently the people behind these projects have added a number of security features that will improve the security of the entire ecosystem. Jordi explains it all to us and gives a glimpse of what’s coming next. ...
Josh welcomes Mike Milinkovich and Thabang Mashologu from the Eclipse Foundation to talk about their new managed Open VSX registry. This is the first open source package registry to create a commercial operation for large company users to help fund the registry. We discuss how we got here, what’s actually going on, and why this commercial approach is working. Everyone knew this day would come, and it looks like the Eclipse Foundation got this one right. ...
I recently talked to Sal Kimmich on the podcast. The topic centered around solutions to many of our existing systemic problems, Sal has an impressive understanding of the current problems as well as how to fix those problems with systemic long term solutions. But systemic fixes are the long game. Things that will help future me are not helpful to present me. And present me, present everyone, is drowning in security problems right now. ...