There are two types of open source projects: those with corporate sponsorship and those that fall under the “labor of love” category. Actually, there’s a third variety: projects that get some support but have to keep looking ahead for the next sponsor.
Some open source projects are so widely used that if anything goes wrong, everyone feels the ripple effects. OpenSSL is one such project; when the Heartbleed flaw was discovered in the open source cryptography library, organizations scrambled to identify and fix all their vulnerable networking devices and software. Network Time Protocol (NTP) arguably plays as critical a role in modern computing, if not more; the open source protocol is used to synchronize clocks on servers and devices to make sure they all have the same time. Yet, the fact remains that NTP is woefully underfunded and undersupported.
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