14 DAY TRIAL // The Mozilla Foundation has announced the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS), a project which will give away $1 million / €0.91 million to open source projects it relies on.
Mozilla, a long-time proponent of open source software, is using its reputation and internal resources to fund a project aimed at giving back to the open source community that has many times in the past provided its engineers with the tools necessary to build software like Firefox or Thunderbird.
The program, which will become a yearly occurrence, is set to award its first prizes around mid-December this year. MOSS will replace Mozilla's previous grants program.
For now, only open source projects that Mozillians "rely on" can apply. For now this means 77 open source projects are currently eligible, but the list will probably be expanded in the following days as employees add the tools they use to that list.
WordPress, jQuery, AngularJS, and others are eligible
Some of the bigger names on that list include AngularJS, Bootstrap, Debian, Django, Elasticsearch, Git, jQuery, MediaWiki, Mercurial, MySQL, Node.js, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Perl, Phalcon PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Selenium, SQLite, Apache Subversion, Travis, Ubuntu, and WordPress.
"Projects which fit into this category and who are in need of funds are welcome to apply for an award," says the MOSS wiki page.
A few things to consider when applying for funds via Mozilla's Open Source Support program:
- Any award request must come from a duo made up of the project's leader and a Mozilla employee.
- The Mozilla employee will serve as liaison and oversee how the funds have been used.
- The funds must be used to benefit the project, and not Mozilla indirectly.
- Projects must have a clear vision of what the awarded money must be used for.