On January 13, 2022, Google joined with other technology industry leaders at the White House Open Source Software Security Summit to help inform the Biden Administration on ways to strengthen cybersecurity. Open source software code is available to the public, and free for anyone to use, modify, or inspect. Because it is freely available, open source software is used for everything from corporate innovation to national security systems and international projects. However, despite its importance, the security of these systems is only maintained on an ad-hoc volunteer basis.
Google utilized this meeting with the Biden Administration to advocate for the creation of an organization to act as a marketplace for open source maintenance; matching volunteers from companies with the critical projects that need the most support.
You can read more about Google’s open source work here.