Google has announced that it is expanding the scope of its recently launched Patch Rewards Programme to include more types of software, including Android.
Launched last month, the program offers benefits to software developers, who not only find vulnerabilities in open source software, but also plan fixes for future releases.
The announcement was made by Michal Zalewski of Googleon Google's Internet Security Blog. The bug hunt now covers code related to Android and the Android Open Source Project, Apache httpd, lighttpd, nginx, Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, OpenVPN, University of Delaware NTPD, Mozilla NSS, libxml2, GCC, binutils, and llvm.
Rewards can range from $500 to $3,133.70, based on a decision made by a team of Google developers, however, they may also offer higher rewards for particularly important projects, or divide it among the developers working on a particular project.
While this may seem like a charitable gesture on Google's part, the potential cost savings for the internet giant are huge, with staff freed up to work on other projects rather than spending time fixing problems that arise in code that is vital to Google's systems.
That doesn't mean, however, that this isn't a big opportunity and Google can hope to push software developers to help make the Internet a safer place.
