
Mozilla Awards $385k to Open Source Projects - nandaja
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/22/mozilla-awards-385000-to-open-source-projects-as-part-of-moss-mission-partners-program/
======
luso_brazilian
The full list:

 _> Tor: 152k_

 _> Tails (secure-by-default live operating system): 77k_

 _> Caddy (HTTP/2 web server that uses HTTPS automatically and by default via
Let’s Encrypt): 50k_

 _> Mio (asynchronous I/O library written in Rust): 30k_

 _> DNSSEC/DANE Chain Stapling (standardizing and implementing a new TLS
extension): 25k_

 _> Godot Engine: (high-performance multi-platform game engine which can
deploy to HTML5): 20k_

 _> PeARS (lightweight, distributed web search engine): 15,5k_

 _> NVDA (open source screen reader): 15k_

I agree with the highlight given the open source screen reader. Accessibility
is very important and unfortunately very neglected, mostly because (IMO) the
tools to properly test can be very expensive or incompatible.

~~~
asimuvPR
Could you expand more about accessibility? Thank you.

~~~
kartD
It's about software for people with accessibility problems. In NVDA's case
(and for computer related accessibility in general), it means vision
impaired/blind. From NVDA:

" It reads the text on the screen in a computerised voice. You can control
what is read to you by moving the cursor to the relevant area of text with a
mouse or the arrows on your keyboard.

NVDA can also convert the text into braille if the computer user owns a device
called a “braille display”."

~~~
majewsky
This is really important, although only to a very small set of users. I know
someone who has to work with a braille display, and he's stuck on Windows XP
since that's the only platform which has a screen reader that fulfils all of
his requirements.

------
andyjdavis
I am curious about the mechanics of how the projects will spend this money. I
have had quite a bit of professional experience working as a developer within
an open source project and I honestly don't know what we would have done had
someone showed up with a one time payment of this size.

The dollar amounts are too low to hire a full-time dev. They presumably have
insufficient volunteers or they wouldn't need this money. So I am guessing
that they will be offering existing volunteers some money to devote more time
to the project.

Another alternative would be hiring in some contractor who has no prior
relationship with the project but having someone who doesn't know the project
come in and implement something before vanishing and leaving everyone else to
maintain their stuff is unappealing.

~~~
mperham
Yep, that's a huge problem with "sustainable" OSS: it's wonderful to get a
one-time $50k grant but if you expect to spend the next 10 years maintaining a
reasonably complex/sized project, that $5k/yr is still minimum wage.

~~~
mholt
I don't think there's any expectation that $50k will fund 10 years of
development.

~~~
fijal
No, but "I donated $10 3 years ago and you guys are SLOW at responding to my
queries!" is an incredibly common attitude. Open Source has shown that it's a
far superior development methodology, but there is definitely some negativity
associated with "expect stuff for free"

~~~
slgeorge
For a lot of OSS projects users who have donated feeling entitled would be a
good problem to have. There are plenty of users who feel entitled and they
don't donate _time_ or _money_!

------
squiguy7
I'm impressed that MIO is getting funding. It will be great to have a safe
library to create event-driven apps in Rust.

~~~
bluejekyll
Yeah. It's a great library. I use it now, there are some things to clean up
cross OS from my experience, but in general it's an excellent multi-os async
library.

------
christophilus
I'd never heard of PeARS. I was _just_ discussing this very idea with a friend
of mine. I'd love to see a decentralized web, but search seems like a really
tricky problem in that space. This is a clever solution.

~~~
icebraining
Never heard of PeARS either, but YaCy has been around for quite a few years:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy)

------
tcdent
I hope this type of funding continues to grow. A significant number of people
getting paid to contribute to public software sounds like some utopia to me.

More people could strive to create projects that actually make the world a
better place, instead of another SaaS product to pay the bills. Some (many,
all?) open source projects provide exponentially more to the world than was
ever invested both monetarily and in donated time. There is not often an
obvious gain for investors, though, so the practice of selfless funding
remains a privilege to few.

------
piotrkubisa
That's awesome news, NVDA and Caddy awarded for contributors work. I hope, in
future there will be more companies donating money to attractive open-software
projects.

~~~
shitloadofbooks
I'm so happy NVDA is getting some funding! I work with a blind music producer
who uses Windows and we make great use of NVDA (and Window Eyes).

------
Perceptes
What do security folks think of the DNSSEC/DANE award? This isn't
substantiated, but my understanding was that those technologies were
considering kind of a joke by the security community.

~~~
e12e
Isn't it more the case of them being a different joke than the CA system and
cert pinning?

~~~
viraptor
It's "apply more of the same" compared to the CA system. Cert pinning is
different, that part is controlled by the actual cert owner, but only starting
on second connection.

~~~
e12e
Well, "trust on first use without revocation" is an entirely special kind of
broken key distribution. But then again, they are all broken.

------
arthursilva
30K for mio, that's a bold move!

~~~
carllerche
There is a lot in the pipeline! I'll be talking more about it soon.

------
EGreg
How do we apply? Our open source platform aims to re-decentralize the web.

[http://qbix.com/platform](http://qbix.com/platform)

~~~
mintplant
> Instructions for applying for MOSS grants can be found under each of the
> three tracks listed on
> [https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958584)

------
AdmiralAsshat
Nice to see Caddy getting some dough.

~~~
moosingin3space
Exactly. Caddy's the first HTTP server I've felt was truly easy to configure
with all the "hosting best practices", and HTTP/2 future-proofing is the
cherry on top.

------
kriro
PeARS looks very interesting I had never heard of it before not had I
considered P2P web-search to be honest. That is a pretty exciting idea and
I'll follow them closely :)

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ndiscussion
TOR and MOSS are both extremely deserving recipients, but I'd say Mozilla is
borderline unethical with their spending.

Of the millions (yes millions) of dollars they've received, little seems to
have gone toward Firefox development.

Mozilla received over $121 million in 2010 from corporate sponsors. This is
the same Mozilla that placed ADS in their new tab views. Really, they placed
Paid Ads on the new tab screen. What were those for again?

I do understand that Mozilla's mission is to improve the web. Donating to
these causes certainly helps with that. But I'm still troubled that they put
ads (with aggregate user tracking) into their core product.

~~~
profeta
can't agree more.

Feature with hundreds of requests gets shunned away. And things that people
heavily opposes gets in just to be like chrome.

All the last features on firefox were corporate driven. Bookmark system by
pocket. Video chat by Telefonica. Sync goals was probably to make their ad
share revenue grow as now you are a logged in user. etc etc etc

Their most well paid dev is a javascript advocate!

Chrome gives you much less control of the web, but everyone uses not because
it is fast, but because firefox is getting behind on everything. While the
owners arguee about UI changes instead of doing what was successful in the
past: put the patch someone already provided as an option and release!

the only interesting thing coming out mozilla nowadays that can change the
world is fennec. the mobile version. But last builds on android cannot be
completed without google proprietary apis anymore. and usability is crap now
that they are trying to "fix" image viewing, which mind you, wasn't broken, it
was just different than chrome.

~~~
sanderjd
> the only interesting thing coming out mozilla nowadays that can change the
> world is fennec.

A couple other interesting things they're working on: Servo[0] is a browser
engine written from the ground up to take better advantage of multi-core
computers. Rust[1] is a programming language that was originally created to
help Servo achieve its goal of building a fast, concurrent, but secure
browser, and has grown into a very interesting project in its own right.

[0]: [https://github.com/servo/servo](https://github.com/servo/servo)

[1]: [https://www.rust-lang.org/](https://www.rust-lang.org/)

------
chachram
This is great news. More companies should donate money to useful open-software
projects

------
EdSharkey
Mozilla, please help fund Privacy Badger for Firefox on Android. Thanks!

~~~
callahad
Instructions for applying for MOSS grants can be found under each of the three
tracks listed on
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS)

------
timwaagh
cool that they are awarding funds, but giving tor this kind of money, it being
a spy/insurgent/criminal tool and after all the scandals it is involved in, is
not great. tails is, of course, another such spy tool. it gives the impression
mozilla is mostly concerned with undermining state/rule of law/formenting
political instability. i think they might contribute more to projects that
benefit everyday digital citizens rather than activists. I like Caddy, Pears,
godot and NVDA though.

~~~
thrkw123456789
? Tor is freely available to any one. Tor browser is so simple my mother uses
it. At this point I don't understand why people would do a websearch for
something they would not discuss in public without using Tor.

~~~
kirkdouglas
I hope Mozilla will add seamless Tor interoperability in future versions of
Firefox.

~~~
thrkw123456789
Some sort of super private browsing mode would be nice. I'm not sure I trust
Mozilla to get that right though. Their main priority is pushing the Web
forward (and keeping up with chrome). Privacy is difficult and conflicts with
functionality in some cases e.g. webrtc, javascript, window size etc. The
current solution where Mozilla have an lts release that the tor project can
use as a base seems quite a good compromise.

------
dave2000
That's great. Now if I could just read www.theonion.com on Firefox for Android
without it crashing every time, that would be sweet.

~~~
cpeterso
Can you share any crash report URLs from your about:crashes page?

~~~
dave2000
You mean this:

[https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/bp-
fa160cdc-8a2...](https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/bp-
fa160cdc-8a25-4935-a105-c0a0b2160623)

?

~~~
cpeterso
Thanks though I don't know why none of the threads in the crash report have
any stack traces. Unfortunately this doesn't look actionable. I'll have to ask
someone to take another look.

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Jommi
Would have been cool of them to support Django.
[https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/](https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/)

~~~
whyever
Why?

~~~
Jommi
Sorry for not explainig futher: -It seems to fit their criteria of Open Source
Projects -They ultilize it a lot in their projects, here is just one big
example:
[https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/](https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/)
-They've received donations from Mozilla before:
[https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/dec/11/django-
awar...](https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/dec/11/django-awarded-moss-
grant/) -The fundraising needs all the help it gets, its only at 20% and over
half of the year has gone :/
[https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/](https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/)

------
_pmf_
Shouldn't they use part of it for making an awesome browser instead of playing
the role of benevolent patron for other projects?

But obviously, I don't know whether they have already given up going against
Chrome.

