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Mozilla Giving $1 Million To Open Source Projects It Relies On (mozilla.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has been a big part of the open source community for a long time, and their main projects rely heavily on independent open source work. They've now announced the Mozilla Open Source Support program, which aims to give back to the projects they rely on, and to also reward other projects that make the community stronger. Mozilla has allocated $1 million to award to these projects — to start. This appears to be Mozilla's efforts to fix a problem we've become painfully aware over the past year and a half: huge portions of the modern web rely on critical bits of open source software whose developers have minimal resources. The company has already begun to compile a list of the projects they rely on. Hopefully it will inspire other organizations to support the open source software projects they rely on as well.
The essential part of free/libre software is access to the source code.
Essential for what, exactly? Access to code doesn't help fix 10-year old bugs. Even developers familiar with the code base take weeks to months to add a simple feature. An outsider, who has no understanding of the code, will take even longer to get anything done.
All open source does is drop a nuke into its area of computing. Once the open source software is entrenched in a certain area, no commercial software is viable anymore. For example, open source firefox has ensured no commercial browser will exist for a long time, if ever. That's because a commercial product can't easily compete with a product priced at $0. So you're stuck with the slow, buggy firefox for a long time, because no one will bother developing an alternative.