Open Source Summit North America is taking place this week in Vancouver. The event, hosted by the Linux Foundation, is a celebration of the open source community. It has the support of many major players in the industry, with news announced during the event coming from AWS, Meta, and more. 

Here are highlights of the event so far: 

AWS open sources Cedar policy language and SDK  

The Cedar language enables you to set permissions in your applications using easy-to-understand policies. By making use of Cedar, application teams can decouple access control from application logic. 

It supports role-based access control and attribute-based access control, and was developed using verification-guided development, which ensures Cedar is correct and secure. 

The language’s SDKs are also being made available, which include libraries for creating and evaluating policies. 

AWS hopes that by open sourcing the language, they can foster more innovation in the industry around fine-grained access management and make access control more accessible to all. 

AWS also announces new open-source fuzzing framework

According to AWS, current fuzzing practices require large codebases to be refactored in order to work properly. The new framework, Snapchange, allows targets to undergo fuzz testing with minimal modifications.

Built in Rust, Snapchange enables developers to build fuzzers that replay snapshots of physical memory in a KVM virtual machine.

SPDX Release Candidate 3.0 now available

Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is an open source standard for communicating the information in a bill of materials. It is currently hosted by the Linux Foundation. 

In RC 3.0, there are now six unique profiles that are designed for popular use cases, with the goal being that SPDX better meets the needs of the industry. The profiles were created based on community input and include specifications for security, licensing, AI, datasets, and software packaging build processes. 

According to the Linux Foundation, the United States’ executive order on cybersecurity and Europe’s Cyber Resiliency Act served as inspiration for the need to have an international standard for supply chain security, which SPDX hopes to be. 

OpenSSF gets major funding from Google and Microsoft, new members

Through its Alpha-Omega Project, OpenSSF has recently received $2.5 million from Google and $2.5 million from Microsoft. 

OpenSSF also announced that Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, Salesforce, and SAP have become general members.

The foundation also announced that Omkhar Arasaratnam will be its new general manager and Brian Behlendorf will be chief technology officer. 

Meta joins the OpenJS Foundation

The OpenJS Foundation provides support for the open source JavaScript community. With Meta joining the foundation as a Gold Member, they will be able to contribute and advocate in the community further.

Meta had already been highly involved with the open source JavaScript community, through its projects React, Jest, and Flow. Jest is an open source testing framework, which Meta contributed to the OpenJS Foundation last year. 

“The broader JavaScript ecosystem benefits from Meta becoming an OpenJS Foundation member. In fact, we’ve already been working together in multiple different ways, and this makes official what has already been a great relationship,” said Shayne Boyer, OpenJS Foundation Board Director. “