
Mozilla Awards Over Half a Million to Open Source Projects - r3bl
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/03/mozilla-awards-half-million-open-source-projects/
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wakamoleguy
This is great! While the headline uses the absolute dollar amount to attract
eyes and look big, I am more impressed by the list of results in the article.
Previous awards from Mozilla have led directly to improvements in Tor, Python
documentation, Kea DHCP, and security audits of NTP services.

As someone who donates a small amount to Mozilla monthly, this makes me feel
good about my choice.

~~~
gertef
The headline doesn't mention "dollars" at all.

~~~
wakamoleguy
That's true. If we are being pedantic, though, it does mention an amount
("half a million"), which turns out to be the number of dollars they awarded
($539,000). So I will stand by statement that the headline mentions the
"dollar amount." :-)

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sova
From the article: "The biggest amount ($194,000) went toUshahidi, an open
source software platform for crowdsourcing, monitoring, visualizing, and
responding to reports from people caught up in political turmoil or subject to
governmental or vigilante abuse. They are working on making it easier to
securely submit reports, and documentation on how to deploy Ushahidi while
minimising risk to the hosts."

Wireless mesh fully distributed world here we come! :)

~~~
r3bl
There's more where that came from:

A $2 Million Prize to Decentralize the Web.
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/21/2-million-prize-
dec...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/21/2-million-prize-decentralize-
web-apply-today/)

[Disclaimer] Mozilla Foundation employee as of recently.

~~~
sova
Thank you for being part of such excellent endeavors! Wow this is actually
really cool; it's a contest?

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zo1
Just looking at it at a glance, 50% of the money went to what appear to be
political/activist projects/websites "masquerading" as "Open-Source", namely
"Ushahidi" (194k/35%) and "RiseUp" (100k/18%). The latter only really putting
their "help site" on github:
[https://github.com/riseupnet](https://github.com/riseupnet). I don't
personally count "open-source" or "any one can contribute" websites/platforms
as actual open-source.

Both the above donations are individually _much_ larger in monetary amounts
than what Mozilla gave the last time around to actual "code" open-source
projects (amounts: 10k, 25k, 30k, 50k) such as Tor/LLVM/etc.

Honestly, I was really excited to see what open-source projects were going to
be getting some (I would assume "much needed") funding behind them, but I was
disappointed with yet more politics. Except for Webpack, definitely kudos to
Mozilla for funding their work on WebAssembly.

~~~
mintplant
[https://labs.riseup.net/code/](https://labs.riseup.net/code/)

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nextos
These are cool projects. I wish they also contributed to some of the addon
projects that make Firefox so unique. Greasemonkey and Vimperator come to
mind. But surely others have good suggestions too.

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triptych
Phaser.io is worthy project and the folks on the team are dedicated to
creating something useful and amazing for the web.

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Sephr
I'd much rather they limited their donations to organizations with still-
breathing warrant canaries (e.g. not RiseUp).

Maybe I'm cynical, but I think that non-profit organizations with dead
_national security_ warrant canaries cannot accomplish technical or social
activism as effectively as they might have in the past.

~~~
slim
The canary is alive

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martell
It would be awesome if we could get some security audit funding focused
towards rust projects. For example an audit of rustls pki and co, so we can
start pushing the rust ecosystem forward without having to depend on c/c++
projects like openssl for production use. Fingers Crossed :D

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ovrdrv3
What does the money go to? cdns and hosting? Or to main contributors? That's
pretty cool nonetheless.

~~~
sova
It must depend on the specific project. Hopefully to more traction bearing and
birthing elements than just hosting

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cJ0th
Incidentally, does Thunderbird still receive money from mozilla?

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r3bl
The latest update from May this year on Thunderbird's status:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-
fu...](https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/)

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sandov
>$100,000 to RiseUp, a coordination platform used by activists across the
political spectrum, to improve the security of their email service;

However, RiseUp has shown to be leftist several times[1]. If I was a right
wing activist or something similar, I would not use RiseUp, because of the
serious conflict of interest of the owners of the platform.

There's nothing wrong with RiseUp being leftist, but I expect Mozilla to be
neutral politically, except when something related to free software is at
stake in politics.

[1]Apart from their logo being a reference to the anarcho-communist flag,
they've said "[...] We do this by providing communication and computer
resources to __allies engaged in struggles against capitalism and other forms
of oppression. __" ([https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/01/responding-to-
antifa...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/01/responding-to-antifa-and-
riseup-on-revolutionary-politics-and-non-violence/)) I'm sure I'd find other
similar quotes if I looked it up.

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chuckharmston
Mozilla isn't neutral politically, though there isn't a specific political
alignment that is endorsed. That is, it's issue-focused, rather than partisan.

We have a strongly-worded manifesto that lays out what we believe:
[https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/](https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/)

Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, talking about how
the current political environment in America might overlay that manifesto:
[https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2017/03/13/the-worldview-
of-...](https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2017/03/13/the-worldview-of-mozilla/)

I'm an employee at Mozilla, though am trying to set personal politics aside to
present public explanation of our institutional viewpoint.

~~~
sandov
Maybe I didn't word my comment correctly. But I thought of politically neutral
as not left-wing nor right-wing, not openly supporting capitalism nor being
openly against capitalism. I wouldn't be surprised by Mozilla pushing privacy,
free speech and copyright related political agendas, but I am surprised by it
supporting a left wing organization.

~~~
confounded
Mozilla certainly do lots of things to _support_ capitalism, too.

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yosito
> In neither of these cases did we find an issue more severe than Medium.

What does that mean?

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mcpherrinm
There's a somewhat loosely standardized set of severity levels in security
audits: informational, low, medium, high, critical.

So no high or critical issues were found. That means probably nothing
exploitable.

~~~
yosito
Got it. Thanks! The capital M made me think they were somehow referring to
medium.com

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zazibar
A wonderful surprise to see Phaser on that list!

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joshsyn
All written in rust :P

