The actual title is "Mozilla Awards $585,000 to Nine Open Source Projects in Q2 2016", and text says "one additional award – to PyPy, the Python JIT compiler, for $200,000".
The other projects awarded are:
Tor - https://www.torproject.org/Tor is a system for using a distributed network to communicate anonymously and without being tracked.
Tails - https://tails.boum.org/
(" secure-by-default live operating system that aims at preserving the user’s privacy and anonymity. ")
Caddy - https://caddyserver.com/Caddy is an HTTP/2 web server that uses HTTPS automatically and by default via Let’s Encrypt
Dnssec - https://www.getdnsapi.net/This project is standardizing and implementing a new TLS extension for transport of a serialized DNSSEC record set
Godot Engine - http://www.godotengine.org/Godot is a high-performance multi-platform game engine which can deploy to HTML5.
Pears - http://pearsearch.org/PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search) is a lightweight, distributed web search engine which runs in an individual’s browser and indexes the pages they visit in a privacy-respecting way.
Nvda - http://www.nvaccess.org/NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows
Hey, I'm the one who received the MOSS award to work on Mio. Funny hearing about this today.
The goal of the Mio work is, in part, to implement a higher level, future based API on top of Mio. The award has been amazingly helpful to allow me to focus on getting it done.
I actually announced Tokio on Wednesday, which is the result of this work:
I think the work is headed in a good direction. I introduced a `Service` trait similar to Finagle to make working with services easier. I also provide a new streamlined way to write non-blocking IO services. The blog post describes this in more detail.
I'll be around if there are any questions about Mio & Tokio.
Great, for the same reason I switched back to Firefox for all my browsing needs on all my devices. I think using Mozilla products is also an important way to support them.
I hate how firefox force users to go to about:config to disable javascript, and to disabble css is more work. The dumb message in about:config, pocket and hello. I don't like any of this /end rant.
Each add-on increases the surface attack area. I only wish a better lynx
That's technically true, but before it was firefox (before it was Firebird, even), It was intended very much as a stripped-down gecko frontend written in XUL, much closer to Lynx than the firefox we all use today.
Servo is very similar in useability to lynx right now, if grandparent is interested in trying it out.
Stripped-down compared to the Mozilla Suite, which came with an email client and HTML editor, but the browser itself was intended to match and extend the Mozilla featureset.
> Not only does Phoenix aim to match the featureset of Mozilla -- subtracting features deemed geeky and better offered as add-ons -- but it extends it. For example, it adds customizable toolbars and quicksearch in bookmarks and history. It will soon offer an add-on manager, a better wallet, and a new downloads sidebar pane.
Yeah, it was really nice when it didn't have the add-on manager yet. just a small, XUL-based browser. Made me switch from Galeon.
Still didn't ever complete the suite, though; Thunderbird tackled email, Sunbird handled contacts. Good thing, too; Seamonkey was a pig on my pentium 133 w/32MB RAM. Played quake fine, but just couldn't handle Seamonkey. Phoenix got me extra life out of my ancient hardware.
These days, Xombrero is getting me the same sort of extra life out of my ancient (or otherwise under-powered, e.g. Raspberry Pi) hardware. It's a very light frontend to GTKWebKit with a glorious vi-like UI.
Now I wonder if it would be worth making something similar in XUL...
I imagine adding the feature of a one click javascript disable would cost a lot of money to mozilla. I wonder how much? That is a very honest question.
$585,000 comes out to 0.1778116% (almost two tenths of one percent) of Mozilla's 2015 revenue of $329,000,000.
As an avid Firefox user since 2007, upon learning a few years ago how much revenue Mozilla takes in, I've always wondered where the hundreds of millions of dollars are spent... I was talking with a colleague about Servo, and was saying, "If they spent allocated 5% of that revenue on Servo, they could hire 70 developers year round at $235,000 each to work on Servo full time, year-round."
Servo is one of a hundred initiatives that they have. They have been developing the Rust Language itself, and all the tooling around it. They are trying to kill PDF plugins with PDF.js. They are trying to kill closed source video codecs with Dalaa. They have been trying to improve online collaboration, multimedia, 3D, and a zillion other things.
They also help with web standards, documentation, legal battles, and advocacy.
Their financial statements are public[1]. In 2014 they spent 212m in software development. I couldn't find an org chart but you can imagine the breadth of work spanning from Firefox and web standards to privacy, vr, servo, rust etc.
While it would be nice to see Servo take off and kick butt, it's generally also more wasteful to square wave the funding than increasing funding gradually, thanks to code churn and architectural learning that occurs in the course of a project. It's not just that you can't cook a baby faster by hiring more chefs. Any code written before Rust 1.0 got frozen had an extra work factor applied to its expected future maintenance cost, as does any that relies on some architectural decision that they later discover needs to be modified, and also new hires are going to be more inefficient for longer when you have a larger proportion of them.
> "If they spent allocated 5% of that revenue on Servo, they could hire 70 developers year round at $235,000 each to work on Servo full time, year-round."
Firefox is a shipping product and Servo is a research project.
Components from Servo are making their way to Firefox as both sides are ready, and parts of Firefox are being written/re-written in Rust as well:
So over time it's certainly possible that more engineers will be allocated to Rust/Servo related projects, as they make their way into shipping products.
Slightly Off Topic: I could never understand how browsers made money, So if somehow i fork an browser and manage to market it to 10M users, all of a sudden i get money?
Edit: I know they are from Ads and searches, but i never quite grasps the economics behind it.
Search engines pay Firefox (and probably other browsers?) to direct traffic to them through the browser search box/awesomebar. I don't know the specifics, but I think a firefox-specific query parameter is included in the searches.
If you want to do this on your own I guess you'd have to make deals with the search companies? I don't think folks will automatically start paying you :)
>We made one additional award – to PyPy, the Python JIT compiler, for $200,000.
This is great. I sincerely hope the PyPy developers see the light soon and start focusing on Python 3.x support, and that this money can help get it done. Haven't written a Python 2 app for something like 4 years? Python 3 is mature now.
I also sincerely hope that this portends Firefox bundling a Python runtime with the browser, providing a DOM API, and letting sites provide client-side scripts in Python. JavaScript has been allowed to reign for much too long.
> This is great. I sincerely hope the PyPy developers see the light soon and start focusing on Python 3.x support
I don't think the lack of Python 3 support was reflective of a value judgment about Python 3, so much as that most of the companies willing to fund PyPy development so far are still on Python 2, and were more interested in funding other kinds of work (performance, numpy, cpython extension compatibility, etc.)
> I also sincerely hope that this portends Firefox bundling a Python runtime with the browser, providing a DOM API, and letting sites provide client-side scripts in Python. JavaScript has been allowed to reign for much too long.
This strikes me as extremely unlikely. There's zero appetite for introducing non-standard language runtimes into browsers these days as far as I can tell. But I guess you never know.
I read it as "There's zero appetite [on the part of browser vendors] for introducing non-standard language runtimes into browsers these days".
Anyway, WebAssembly [0][1] is coming through the pipeline with the goal of opening a common browser runtime to more languages. Instead of Mozilla incorporating a Python runtime into Firefox, a Python runtime will eventually be able to target WebAssembly. For Python specifically, the work in progess on builtin GC support should help a lot [2].
As for the donation to PyPy, Mozilla uses Python heavily in internal tooling so I imagine that's part of the motivation.
The python runtime is fairly heavyweight, on the order of megabytes, unless I'm mistaken. This would be something that would be downloaded with every page request (although it may be cached in most cases)...
So I'm not sure it will be something you will want to use in a lot of places.
> I also sincerely hope that this portends Firefox bundling a Python runtime with the browser, providing a DOM API, and letting sites provide client-side scripts in Python. JavaScript has been allowed to reign for much too long.
Not going to happen. Web Assembly is the one "alternate runtime" (which isn't really an alternate runtime) that is ever going to exist.
'twould be interesting if one could take a JIT'd or even partially JIT'd python program as input and get WASM out. You could have it be like a http server feature.
"I also sincerely hope that this portends Firefox bundling a Python runtime with the browser, providing a DOM API, and letting sites provide client-side scripts in Python."
I expect WebASM to eventually get DOM bindings. At that point you'll compile your Python into WebASM.
Google tried this with Dart and ended up backing out. That was the only real chance at having a commercial browser include a language runtime other than JS. WebAssembly is where it's at.
I wish the money would go towards lobbying the government for more direct support for open source projects in the $1 billion range. It still is a great ROI for the feds and other governments.
Companies that use open source software as well as create it should lobby the government for funding open source as well. This would include Google, IBM, Redhat, Microsoft, Facebook....
Wait, non-profits (generally seen as organizations doing good by their very definition) cannot lobby but other organizations (with making money as their principal goal) can?
> This isn't true at all. They just don't pass profits to shareholders.
"The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency."
A charitable nonprofit allows its donors to take a tax deduction. If you run a non charitable nonprofit (donors don't get a tax deduction, but the corporation is tax exempt) or a corporation that happens to not make any money (pays no taxes de facto) then you can lobby.
> Wait, non-profits (generally seen as organizations doing good by their very definition) cannot lobby but other organizations (with making money as their principal goal) can?
Non-profits (including some tax exempt non-profits) may lobby, but charities are more restricted [0]. Note that charities -- 501(c)(3) organizations -- are not just tax exempt, but donations to them are tax deductible to the donors, which amounts to a public subsidy of donations that increases (due to progressive marginal income tax rates) with the income of the donor.
[0] But they may still lobby...as noted in the IRS page referenced upthread, charities "may engage in some lobbying", but lobbying can't be a "substantial part of its activities".
What about corporations owned by nonprofits? AFAIK Mozilla Corporation, a Foundation subsidiary, is bigger than the foundation and has a significant portion of the Foundation's funds flowing through it for tax purposes.
Agreed, and the money would be more fairly distributed.
Many of the open source projects mentioned already have a pretty strong vested financial interest behind them. They are no longer true open source projects.
I think it's natural for popular open source projects to eventually turn into businesses but I think there is a point where they really shouldn't be considered 'open source' any more and Mozilla is definitely one of them.
If 'open source' isn't about having.... I dunno, all your source-code being licensed under an OSS license... then what exactly is it?
I think the word you're having more of an issue with isn't 'open source', but defining what exactly a 'project' is vs. a business. On that latter point, I would agree with you that a project doesn't seem as much of a 'project' when most of the core people are employed to work on it towards specific goals the funders have designated.
As long as the source is open under a permissive licence they are open source.
If someone has figured out a way to make a profit model around it - I would say, that is a bonus as it entails support for a long time and guarantees end-user-valuable goals driving the project.
When was the last time government was responsible for distributing something fairly?
I think the consumers of the open source software must be responsible to ensure financial health of those projects and not tax payers. Simply because in such cases more useful projects would thrive where as bad projects would die out quickly.
The last thing I want to hear is that Mozila called Bill Clinton for a lecture paid him $1M and later Hillary gave a grant of $100M of my money to Mozilla. That is how governments works.
I'm all for them donating money for FOSS projects, but I had the impression that Mozilla doesn't make the most amount of money, being a non-profit and all. Can someone who knows more comment on this?
In the United States, a non-profit does not earn money for owners or investors. NP's do make money via donations and services provided. While many NP's make very little money or mostly distribute donated funds, other NP's can make large amounts of money. Money retained in excess of expenses, must be used to further a NP's mission.
A NP Hospital uses its excess funds to provide free services to those who cannot afford healthcare and does community outreach and eduction.
Mozilla uses its money to supports other OSS projects, advocates for OSS.
(This is a very simple explanation with many details of how NP's operate ignored, or the various legal types of NP's.)
But the profits in a co-op still go to the owners, hence it's not a NP. I'm sure a NP could be structured like a co-op though, where workers get input into decision making.
I'm on the board for a co-op (housing co-op, not worker co-op) that's incorporated as a non-profit. I know we've talked about how we could have incorporated as a cooperative instead, and I think we could have been a cooperative non-profit....we just weren't.
Co-op is about ownership (and the seven principles, but legally I think chiefly about ownership), whereas I don't think non-profit status is, for the most part.
They could have hired more developers, returned the money to doners, increase the salary of their employees and what not. The only thing they can not do is give the money as dividend to the owners the way for-profit companies do all the time.
Mitchell Baker has spoken many times publicly about why she chose the NPO structure for Mozilla. It was due to the Browser Wars of the 90s (when she was counsel at Netscape) and not wanting to go through that again.
Mozilla has a revenue stream of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Most of it comes from partnerships with the search engines. Non-profit just means that making money is not their primary goal but it is one the important goals in order to make them self sufficient and enable them to work towards their true goals.
This is something that has bewildered me -- Where does all that money go!?
I understand it is not cheap to hire developers but it just seems really weird that the Mozilla foundation has had over a billion dollars flow through it and all they have to show for it is a web browser (and other software).
You might be right. According to openhub Firefox had 1121 contributors last year. Compared to that Chromium had 1919 contributors. Not all of them work for Mozilla and Google respectively and not all employees commit to the code base...
They just seem to be not very good at it, because from 40 -> 50 - memory usage is much worse than previous versions (Yes, I know switching to the MP model has to do with it, but if your architectural changes hurt usability for security I consider that quite poor), the developer tools are still trash, and performance is still worse than chrome.
There's a big misunderstanding out in the world about what exactly "Mozilla" is. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit. They are an advocacy group for open internet standards, essentially. They do not do any of the software development on Mozilla projects. That would be the Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the Foundation. The Corporation is decidedly not a non-profit.
If the only restrictions on nonprofits are what profits are returned to the owners, if The company is wholly owned by a non-profit what can it do that it couldn't if it wasn't itself a non-profit?
IANAL, and I'm hazy on the details, but I think this lets the for-profit one hold on to more money (but also be taxed more?). There still aren't any shareholders (unless you count the Foundation as one).
Basically, there are limits to what a non profit can do and still be a non profit (keeping a larger cash reserve is one of them iirc) Legally keeping the revenue generating business seperate (and having that revenue feed back to the nonprofit) as a for-profit, taxed organization, is useful.
It seems to be a common pattern. Googling "501(c)(3) for profit subsidiary" gives a bunch of links explaining the reasons why many choose to do this.
That's literally why the Corporation exists. It's a sham to be able to do whatever they want and still maintain the perception that Mozilla is a non-profit.
This is the first time I hear about PeARS project. (Quick search on HN shows nothing relevant.) Its goals look great and ambitious. Wonder why it doesn't get more publicity?
P.S. And they should consider changing the project name.
I must second this. Godot is… well, it's hard to believe it's actually a free and open-source project. It's a cross-platform 3D and 2D game engine with a fully integrated development environment (including a friendly visual editor for 3D and 2D scene graphs) and its own custom scripting language. Akin to Unity 3D in the proprietary world.
I decided to try it out this week to make a (3D!) game, and I've been consistently surprised by how pleasant an experience it has been. The community's been helpful when I've had problems, too.
If you use Firefox and search for your Amazon product through the search bar in the right hand corner, Firefox gets a cut of that purchase. You can see the string "Mozilla" in the URL in fact. You may be able to combine this with smile to get the best of bother worlds.
Hi, I represent PyPy project. We don't have personal connection to mozilla nor we're successful enough to pay engineers full time. Can you explain some of your accusations?
Throwing money at open source projects does not in any way inherently "corrupt" them. This false argument needs to end so we can more easily and more fully fund OSS development.
Open source does not and never has meant non-commercial. There are very successful open source companies making money both for profit and not for profit. Value added products and services around open source software is a good thing for OSS.
Rust and Python aren't playing in the same space, at all. One is a low-level systems programming language and the other is a high-level interpreted one. PyPy's core technology is potentially also useful for powering JIT interpreters for other interpreted languages, but again: doesn't compete with Rust. If anything, they're complementary, as Rust can serve as an alternative to C for writing performance-sensitive Python modules.
Anyhow, as they say in the release, the track through which PyPy was funded is for technologies Mozilla already uses. They're big Python users on the web services side (e.g., the Mozilla add-ons site is a Django app if I recall correctly), so this is an investment in improving the performance of their existing apps.
Even if Python is higher level language, most of python uses today could be replaced with Rust. There are very few scenarios in which a higher level language is needed (and in those scenarios, you don't need the speed and improvements of PyPy, with normal slow Python it's enough).
Most of the build process is in Rust[0], but something needs to kick it off: instead of assuming/requiring that install the correct version of Rust (for the right platform) themselves and then invoke cargo in the right place to get the build manager, there's a relatively short Python script[1] that does all of that automatically. Python works well because it's everywhere, and it's already a dependency of the build process (LLVM needs it).
That's my guess, too. I thought Rust might handle a build system by now with all the libraries pouring out. So, I figured I'd ask anyway in case any interesting answers showed up.
Its job is to download the previous Rust release (beta for master, stable for beta and previous stable for current stable), including Cargo, build the build system with Cargo and start it.
The build system then builds native dependencies (LLVM) and runs Cargo several times for different components.
Rust competes at a different level than Python, right? Rust is a system-level language analogous to C. It's not meant to displace something like Python.
I basically never touch python, and could get behind this.
edit: What I mean is that even as someone who no longer uses Python or PyPy, I see the value in a project like PyPy.js emitting web assembly. It seem like a great goal for lang.js projects in general, hopefully Opal, and Clojurescript will do the same.
If you're running an open source software project, we're doing awesome stuff with makers/inventors/developers over on Baqqer[0]. We want to help grow and foster more open creation and community building by building a healthy and supportive ecosystem of people sharing, building, selling, and even crowdfunding together.
We're bringing capital, resources, and community to people building the future. It actually started because I was trying to get people on-board when I was building Playa (http://getplaya.com) and found my VC friends (even VC strangers https://medium.com/@sinkorswim/launching-at-launch-my-entire...) didn't know what I was talking about, but my technical friends did. So I thought it would be cool to build something that might help people building other cool stuff that might not have/desire the need for traditional funding, and also provides all the tools (newsletters, updates, engagement, shops, knowledge-share) needed to build a real and viable community of supporters for whatever you're sharing/building/selling/crowdfunding.
I see a lot of founders who don't include community through every step of building product, so they have a hard time with distribution and finding reception of their products at launch. We're getting people to understand that without tons of unicorn money it's essential to build an organic following by including their communities in the feedback loop early and often -- simply building alone is itself not enough. :)
The other projects awarded are:
Tor - https://www.torproject.org/ Tor is a system for using a distributed network to communicate anonymously and without being tracked.
Tails - https://tails.boum.org/ (" secure-by-default live operating system that aims at preserving the user’s privacy and anonymity. ")
Caddy - https://caddyserver.com/ Caddy is an HTTP/2 web server that uses HTTPS automatically and by default via Let’s Encrypt
Mio - https://github.com/carllerche/mio Mio is an asynchronous I/O library written in Rust.
Dnssec - https://www.getdnsapi.net/ This project is standardizing and implementing a new TLS extension for transport of a serialized DNSSEC record set
Godot Engine - http://www.godotengine.org/ Godot is a high-performance multi-platform game engine which can deploy to HTML5.
Pears - http://pearsearch.org/ PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search) is a lightweight, distributed web search engine which runs in an individual’s browser and indexes the pages they visit in a privacy-respecting way.
Nvda - http://www.nvaccess.org/ NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows
Edit: added project descriptions from
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/22/mozilla-awards-3850...
Also, moderators changed the title to the one in the article (original submission mentioned PyPy only).