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Mozilla Giving $1 Million To Open Source Projects It Relies On (mozilla.org)

Posted by Soulskill on from the leading-by-example dept.

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.

8 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Drop in the bucket by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nice of them to give 0.3% of their funding to projects they couldn't live without.
    They piss away more than this on considerably less useful projects.

    The cynic in me says that $1 million isn't far off the value of this as a purely PR exercise.

  2. serviscope_minor is taking a vacation by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    I hope that they'll give preference to projects that are minority friendly. Not giving such a preference would be tantamount to reinforcing the phallocratic caucasiopatriarchy that dominates the IT profession today.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:serviscope_minor is taking a vacation by pr0nbot · · Score: 5, Funny

      As a left-handed disabled black Jewish ginger bi-trans BSD user, I demand you send me the aforementioned monies.

  3. I knew I'd see OpenSSL on that list... by bmajik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Instead of LibreSSL.

    Mozilla is big enough that they can have an opinion on how the web should work, and the web will move.

    They should dump OpenSSL and invest in a winner.

    --
    My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
    1. Re:I knew I'd see OpenSSL on that list... by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Like so many OSS forks in general, they are just a bunch of one-time posers.

      Doubtful. OpenBSD has a reputation for forking software and making it more secure. They've been doing it for longer than Mozilla existed.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. MUA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wish they would invest it in their MUA, (Thunderbird) - so it had good interactions with calendar and a good address book. Still fighting to get rid of Outlook here....

  5. Re:OpenBSD by Moridineas · · Score: 2

    OpenBSD started as a fork of NetBSD, actually. All of the BSDs cross pollinate to a large degree, however.

  6. Kudos to Mozilla for this one by iampiti · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I dislike the direction Firefox is taking as much as anyone but gotta congratulate Mozilla for this initiative.
    I'd be nice if companies which depend on other open source software did the same too (I'm sure many already do).
    Also, although I don't like it, I understand they got to make money to keep going and so I understand why they do things like the new sponsored squares in new tabs.