Bug bounty drives VLCs biggest patch but attracts assholes, scriptkiddies, scammers
Summary
Developers of the hugely popular open-source media player, VLC, have released the projects biggest patch since launching in 2001, thanks to an EU-funded bug-bounty program. VLC was one of 14 projects to receive bug-bounty support from the European Commissions latest edition of the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project, announced by EU Member of Parliament Julia Reda from the German Pirate Party in late 2018. Despite the benefit to VLC users from the EU-funded scheme, Kempfs personal views about the value of bug-bounty programs remains a "mixed bag". Actually, the bonus is part of EU FOSSA funding designed specifically to address this resource issue. Besides his reservations about the incentive structure of bug bounties with respect to open-source projects, Kempf had some harsh words for the type of researcher such programs attract.
