Mozilla Funds a Series of Promising Open Source Projects
You can always count on Mozilla for an interesting spin on open source. Last year, Mozilla launched the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) – an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. As The VAR Guy notes: "The Mozilla Foundation has long injected money into the open source ecosystem through partnerships with other projects and grants. But it formalized that mission last year by launching MOSS, which originally focused on supporting open source projects that directly complement or help form the basis for Mozilla's own products."
Now, the company has announced that In the third quarter of this year, MOSS awarded over $300,000 to four projects which it either already supported, or which were in line with the Mozilla mission.
"On the Foundational Technology track, we awarded $100,000 to Redash, a tool for building visualizations of data for better decision-making within organizations, and $50,000 to Review Board, software for doing web-based source code review. Both of these pieces of software are in heavy use at Mozilla. We also awarded $100,000 to Kea, the successor to the venerable ISC DHCP codebase, which deals with allocation of IP addresses on a network. Mozilla uses ISC DHCP, which makes funding its replacement a natural move even though we haven’t deployed it yet."
"On the Mission Partners track, we awarded $56,000 to Speech Rule Engine, a code library which converts mathematical markup into vocalised form (speech) for the sight-impaired, allowing them to fully appreciate mathematical and scientific content on the web."
Applications for Foundational Technology and Mission Partners grants remain open, with the next batch deadline being the end of November 2016. These funding programs from Mozilla have becom significant. If you have a project that could use a grant, look into whether it might qualify.