Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)

We're launching SecureBuild: https://securebuild.com — a new way for open source projects and maintainers to earn revenue by partnering with and endorsing our Zero-CVE container images of their project.

We’ve spent the last decade at Replicated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9841243) helping commercial and open source software vendors securely distribute their apps to enterprise environments. During that time, we saw firsthand how hard it is for maintainers to fund their work, and how increasingly demanding enterprises have become when it comes to demonstrable security and scanning.

SecureBuild is our attempt to bridge that gap. Built on top of Wolfi (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36489847), we provide Zero-CVE container images with tight SLAs, full SBOMs, etc, but we route 70% of direct subscription revenue back to the open source projects that create them.

We’re especially interested in partnering with open source maintainers who want to make their projects more secure and sustainable without changing licenses. We handle builds, hosting, sales, patching, and customer delivery.

I'm Grant (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grantmiller), co-founder of Replicated & co-creator of SecureBuild, working with my co-founder Marc Campbell (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marcc). We hope this can be part of a broader push toward a more secure, economically sustainable future for open source.

Happy to answer questions and share more details!

Comments (12)

jenny91 · 3h ago

The intersection of entities whose security is based around "responding to every CVE quickly" and the entities that care about supporting OSS projects has measure zero.

grantlmiller · 3h ago

well... our core users are ISVs (who distribute commercial software into enterprise controlled, self-hosted environments... think big banks, governments, tech companies). They care about supporting OSS (almost 1/2 of them are open core themselves) and their customers mandate that they care about closing out CVEs quickly in the software they're consuming from them.

cube00 · 4h ago

> New SecureBuilds are created whenever upstream CVEs are available, with a 6-day SLA for critical vulnerabilities.

Aren't most SecOps pushing 48 hours as the absolute limit for critical vulns or are ours just being extra pushy?

marcc · 4h ago

We often deliver in way less than 6 days but sometimes the dependency tree is deep for a patch.

I've seen most auditors mandate 30 days for Critical, but you clearly want to move a lot quicker than that.

grantlmiller · 3h ago

the goal is going to be 6 hours!

mike_d · 3h ago

> I've seen most auditors mandate 30 days for Critical, but you clearly want to move a lot quicker than that.

You seem to fundamentally not understand security. A proper security program should never be driven by an auditors expectations or even used as a reasonable guideline.

Don't track CVEs and SLAs in days. You need to have patches out before active exploitation in the wild begins, that is the only metric that matters. Go talk to Greynoise about how to get that data.

grantlmiller · 3h ago

We’d love for this to be true... most images fill up with CVEs so fast in dependencies, we’re providing minimal images (much less surface area) and have the automation to rebuild the entire dependency graph at least daily, if not multiple times per day.

Hopefully everyone will run a "proper security program" someday!

mike_d · 2h ago

It can be true for you if your correct your thinking on the problem.

CVEs are basically just bugs that are not triggered by normal operation. If you race to "fix" them all, you are going to drown (as you are discovering).

Focus on your solution for tracking actively exploited vulnerabilities and a prioritization system and you'll greatly simplify the problem while better serving your customers.

siggy · 5h ago

thanks for sharing. what's the onboarding process look like? if i'm maintaining my own Dockerfiles today, do you or I evaluate and port those to SecureBuild/Wolfi?

marcc · 5h ago

We work together on it. Assuming you have a build process and dockerfile (we all do), generally our team can get you listed in the catalog quickly.

It's not too much work since we built on an existing set of tools (melange & apko). I've actually found that putting a Dockerfile into ChatGPT generates a really good first iteration.

dhorthy · 5h ago

this looks cool - your homepage video should open with what it is though!

grantlmiller · 5h ago

thanks! say more about what you mean... you're saying instead of: Secure, Sustainable Open Source Partner with SecureBuild to offer secure, vulnerability-free builds of your open source project while generating recurring software revenue, no support contracts required.

we should say something different?