Mozilla Giving $1 Million To Open Source Projects It Relies On (mozilla.org) 68
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has been a big part of the open source community for a long time, and their main projects rely heavily on independent open source work. They've now announced the Mozilla Open Source Support program, which aims to give back to the projects they rely on, and to also reward other projects that make the community stronger. Mozilla has allocated $1 million to award to these projects — to start. This appears to be Mozilla's efforts to fix a problem we've become painfully aware over the past year and a half: huge portions of the modern web rely on critical bits of open source software whose developers have minimal resources. The company has already begun to compile a list of the projects they rely on. Hopefully it will inspire other organizations to support the open source software projects they rely on as well.
Drop in the bucket (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice of them to give 0.3% of their funding to projects they couldn't live without.
They piss away more than this on considerably less useful projects.
The cynic in me says that $1 million isn't far off the value of this as a purely PR exercise.
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Well, to answer your question: "Essential" for it to meet the definition.
That's all "essential" meant right there.
Definition of what? Certainly not "free/libre software [slashdot.org]".
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For example, open source firefox has ensured no commercial browser will exist for a long time, if ever. That's because a commercial product can't easily compete with a product priced at $0. So you're stuck with the slow, buggy firefox for a long time, because no one will bother developing an alternative.
Edge, Safari, and Internet Explorer all still exist as commercial browsers. There are probably others, one might include Chrome in the list, but that's enough to make me scratch my head at your statement. I can't actually speak on the usability of any of them, nor for Firefox really, as I use Opera which is based on Chromium.
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Wasn't IE offered free to users to bankrupt Netscape? IE was a pre-emptive strike against Netscape threatening the Windows monopoly. It's not a commercial browser and neither are Chrome or Safari. Opera is perhaps the only commercial browser but it has a miniscule marketshare.
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They're all commercial - you pay for them when you pay for the OS. I'm not sure if Chrome fits but it seems to - you buy the ChromeOS and you get Chrome with it. That makes them commercial.
serviscope_minor is taking a vacation (Score:3, Funny)
I hope that they'll give preference to projects that are minority friendly. Not giving such a preference would be tantamount to reinforcing the phallocratic caucasiopatriarchy that dominates the IT profession today.
Re:serviscope_minor is taking a vacation (Score:5, Funny)
As a left-handed disabled black Jewish ginger bi-trans BSD user, I demand you send me the aforementioned monies.
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I reject your gender categories, oppressor!
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There are ~14 million jews in the world.
7 million of whom are women.
10% are left handed that makes 700K.
If 13 percent are black it makes 91K.
1.8% bi-sexual that makes 1638.
20.8% are disabled that makes 340
35.7% are obese that makes 585.
(just multiplied those 2 numbers) 7.42% are obese and disabled that makes 121
and 804 are either obese or disabled.
Now I made myself feel bad with math.
(using US stats because 40%+ of jews live in the US and a
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It's between 1% and 2%.
that's makes you unique.
121 * [1%, 2%] = [1.21, 2.42]
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(FWIW I think you're also calling BSD users fat.)
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With a mind that sharp, you should be at Harvard or Oxford.
In a jar of formaldehyde.
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MIT would like to have a word with you. ;-)
No, I don't really care. Yes, there are a lot of Asian people there - I stopped by the campus, about two months ago, and the stereotypes are true. It's full of Asians. I look Asian to most people so I guess I'd fit in now.
I have a different idea? (Score:1)
How about using that money to hire people that still remember how a browser should work?
Just sayin'.
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Why don't you go in and correct it? Afterall, that's the beauty of Open Source!
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At a certain point that's no longer the case. Systems become too integrated and any mention of changing them is met with derision and ego.
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Simple. Mozilla has started becoming a closed monoculture that refuses changes because they'd rather add things in that the average person doesn't need. If you need any proof of that, compare firefox to palemoon(branch). FF is roughly double the size of PM, but the latter can do everything the first one does. And has a better memory footprint.
I knew I'd see OpenSSL on that list... (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of LibreSSL.
Mozilla is big enough that they can have an opinion on how the web should work, and the web will move.
They should dump OpenSSL and invest in a winner.
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Like so many OSS forks in general, they are just a bunch of one-time posers.
Doubtful. OpenBSD has a reputation for forking software and making it more secure. They've been doing it for longer than Mozilla existed.
OpenBSD (Score:2)
Cripes, OpenBSD is a HUGE fork of nearly everything from FreeBSD. Runs pretty damn well.
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OpenBSD started as a fork of NetBSD, actually. All of the BSDs cross pollinate to a large degree, however.
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I thought they originally forked from NetBSD then started aligning more with FreeBSD, as FreeBSD had a more up-to-date codebase.
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No. OpenBSD is still much closer to NetBSD than to FreeBSD.
The only thing close to FreeBSD is Dragonfly, and that's only because they forked from it.
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I think it does work on every platform people actually use these days, but I think that is what scared people away from it initially.
I agree with you though, LibreSSL is much more likely to end up secure.
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This is just a list of software they rely on, not an opinion piece or a list of software they will fund. Are you saying they rely on LibreSSL? It's not like they currently use either one in Firefox.
MUA (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish they would invest it in their MUA, (Thunderbird) - so it had good interactions with calendar and a good address book. Still fighting to get rid of Outlook here....
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AND integrate built-in GnuPG support AND fix the performance issues.
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Yes, but a good e-mail client should support BOTH S/MIME and GnuPG by default.
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Concur. Three thrice Three times.
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If I were Mozilla, I would be giving some money to Bernie Sanders to support his campaign. If we can get Sanders elected, that will be more beneficial to future prosperity than continuing to float OpenSSL.
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And you spend all your spare time and spend all your spare money on feeding the homeless, I assume?
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Er, it's a wiki. Add it.
Kudos to Mozilla for this one (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be nice if companies which depend on other open source software did the same too (I'm sure many already do).
Also, although I don't like it, I understand they got to make money to keep going and so I understand why they do things like the new sponsored squares in new tabs.
Some projects may actually have to much money (Score:2)
And Mozilla is probably one of the best examples. They used to make a browser, now they implement every miss feature they can find, from DRM over HTTP/2 to binary Javascript.
Instead of saying, "We want a simpler web", they just continue on with layer after layer of complexity, making it harder for competitors to write their own browsers.
Of course they also do great stuff like investing into codec research, however they more and more behave like any big company.