The first set of awards in the Mozilla Open Source Support have been announced. The program was launched with an initial allocation of $1million and seven projects have shared $503,000.
When MOSS was launched in October, see our report, Mozilla Foundation's Chair Mitchell Baker explained that the idea of the program was to support open source projects that contribute to Mozilla's work and to the Web and that it would have both a "give back" element for projects that Mozilla relies on and a "give forward element" to make the entire community for successful.
At the time it was envisaged that up to 10 projects would receive awards in the first round to projects identified by its newly appointed MOSS "Foundational Technology Committee and only the "give back" element is active
The following awards have been made:
Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
CodeMirror: $20,000. CodeMirror is a powerful source code editor built with Web technologies, used in the Developer Tools and in Mozilla Thimble. Their award will be used to improve support for both right-to-left languages and complex script input.
Discourse: $25,000. Discourse is online discussion forum software, used by several Mozilla communities. Their award will be used to make email a first-class interaction mechanism for Discourse, allowing Discourse instances to replace and improve upon mailing lists.
Read The Docs: $48,000. Read The Docs is a website for building and hosting documentation, used by many of Mozilla’s Web projects. Their award will be used to add the ability to generate documentation from code without needing to install it, thereby making it easier to build the documentation for complex projects.
Mercurial: $75,000. Mercurial is a distributed source code management system, used heavily by Mozilla for core repositories such as mozilla-central. Their award will be used to implement better support for ‘blame’ (showing who last changed some code) and a better web UI.
Django: $150,000. Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets.
Bro: $200,000. Bro is network monitoring software, which is at the heart of Mozilla’s intrusion detection system for their network. Their award will be used to build the Comprehensive Bro Archive Network, a public repository of modules and plugins for Bro.
The announcement points out that so far just over half the money has been allocated. This leaves most of half a million dollars in the kitty. The announcement also notes that further awards relating to the "Foundational Technology" track, i.e. giving back to the projects it relies on, will be made an ongoing basis, invites applications using a supplied form.
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