The world's biggest technology companies are donating millions of dollars to fund improvements in open source programs like OpenSSL, the software whose "Heartbleed" bug has sent the computer industry into turmoil.
Amazon, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel and Microsoft are among a dozen companies that have agreed to be founding members of a group known as Core Infrastructure Initiative. Each will donate $300,000 to the venture, which is recruiting more backers among technology companies as well as the financial services sector.
Other early supporters are Dell, Fujitsu, NetApp, Rackspace Hosting and VMware.