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Mozilla Hands Out Open Source Awards (mozilla.org)
An anonymous reader writes: A couple months ago, we discussed news that Mozilla was planning to give back to the open source projects they rely on, to the tune of $1 million. Now, Mozilla has announced the first round of awards, giving out $503,000 in the process. The biggest payout, $200,000, went to Bro, who makes network monitoring software. They plan to use the funds to create "a public repository for sharing 3rd-party scripts and plug-ins." The Django project received $150,000, and they'll use it to "rewrite the core of Django to support (among other things) WebSockets and background tasks," and a few other goodies. Mercurial was awarded $75,000, which will go toward "better support for 'blame' (showing who last changed some code) and a better web UI." Also receiving awards were Read The Docs ($48,000), Discourse ($25,000), CodeMirror ($20,000), and BuildBot ($15,000).
In all seriousness, it is not like that at all. It is like giving someone begging on the street money for food, which they do spend on food or lodging. Because of that money they are able to get a job and start making money. Years later they donate some of their newfound wealth to some others. Your donation "back in the day" was not an investment. You wanted them to survive and produce a browser to compete with IE. They did just that, spectacularly well (until Chrome came around at least).
Also, these companies Mozilla is donating to are in no way akin to "a hooker on either arm". They are open source companies whose software Mozilla has used extensively. It isn't even a showy display of PR activism, but a self-serving act. They want these companies to keep going, or accelerate development of features that Mozilla wants. When companies don't support the open source software they use, we end up with Heartbleed.