Before April 2014, OpenSSL was a backwater open source project with fewer than 10 regular contributors and 1 1/2 maintainers. Meanwhile its code had become a pillar of secure communication and data privacy in the industry. This was an unstable situation that was exposed when the Heartbleed bug became global news.

The way the OpenSSL project responded to this crisis was informed by the principles of open source. Jon Ericson, the Community Manager for the OpenSSL Foundation, explains how a security bug ignited community growth and how the open source community provides ongoing stability to the OpenSSL project.