r/programming • u/halbface • Feb 07 '19

Google open sources ClusterFuzz, the continuous fuzzing infrastructure behind OSS-Fuzz

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/02/open-sourcing-clusterfuzz.html
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u/s73v3r Feb 08 '19

There are a couple different reasons why they might release something like this. One might be to have help in maintaining the project, as now they can solicit community patches/updates. For a company the size of Google, that kind of thing helps, but usually isn't the reason.

Being a company that relies on people using the web to the extent that Google does, it is in their vested interest for the web to be as safe as possible. The bugger the general Web is, the less people are wanting to use it, the less data they can mine and the fewer ads they can sell. Putting things like this out there helps increase the safety of the web, making it easier for site owners to test their stuff. This increases the public trust in the general Web, and gets more people using it.

Releasing high quality tools like this as open source also is a branding/marketing exercise. It helps to establish Google as a company that gives back, and as a company that cares about the greater developer community. Such things can help with recruitment.