Google is one of the few companies out there that openly asks people to break their software. They’ve been paying white-hat security researchers to patch Chrome bugs for years. What exactly is a white-hat hacker? It’s someone who finds security exploits and reports them to companies instead of using said exploits for their own personal gain. People who do the latter are referred to as “black-hat” hackers.

Last night, on the search giant’s “Online Security” blog, Google announced that they’ve expanded their rewards program to a few more open source projects, namely Android and several other projects that relate to internet plumbing. What kind of rewards are we talking about here? They range from as little as $500 to as much as $3,133.70 (otherwise known as ‘elite’ in hacker slang). So if you’ve got the talent and want to use it for good, time to start hacking!

Stepping back a little, should Android even be considered an open source project? Sure, the code is up there on Google’s servers for anyone to download, but Google doesn’t update said code until they release a new version of Android. That’s not how a real open source project should work. Take Firefox or CyanogenMod for instance. They have nightly builds reflecting all the changes that have been made to the code in the past 24 hours. Android gets updated twice a year, if that. That’s not to say you shouldn’t help Google, but what if you find a bug in Android 4.4 that’s already been fixed by Google internally and will come out with 4.4.1?

Something to think about.