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Comment by wakamoleguy | Hacker News Reader

This is great! While the headline uses the absolute dollar amount to attract eyes and look big, I am more impressed by the list of results in the article. Previous awards from Mozilla have led directly to improvements in Tor, Python documentation, Kea DHCP, and security audits of NTP services.

As someone who donates a small amount to Mozilla monthly, this makes me feel good about my choice.

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This is interesting. Is there a list somewhere of all projects that Mozilla has helped in the past?

Huge respect to them.

There's a "Past Recipients" section on the MOSS page: https://www.mozilla.org/moss/

I'm sad about pears search, the IRC channel is dead and there's been no meaningful activity in the repo for a while.

Hmm, it looks like the Caddy web server got $50,000 at one point (in 2016 apparently). They were the ones who recently decided (in mid 2017) that it was a good idea to add HTTP headers advertising the names of their sponsors to their open source version. Then, when someone forked their project, they filed a GitHub issue one hour later accusing the fork of trademark infringement! See the discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237923

As to this year's MOSS recipients, Ushahidi received almost $200,000. They're a Kenya-based startup that was the darling of the Nairobi tech scene a few years ago but have increasingly come under criticism for their leadership during a recent sexual harassment scandal:

https://qz.com/1026890/kenyas-ushahidi-is-investigating-sexu...

Furthermore, one of their affiliated startups, who was making a "rugged" router powered by OpenWRT, was violating the GPL and was being quite dismissive and condescending to those of us who pointed out that they should be releasing the source code of their product. I covered this on my personal blog at the time:

https://mjanja.ch/2015/05/brck-in-violation-of-the-gpl/

Shocked the developer of caddy couldn't retire on that $50K

I'm not sure why people are so worked up over caddy. The http header "feature" got promptly removed, and the trademark infrigment claim is necessary for them to avoid dilluting their trademark. Furthermore, they politely told the fork maintainer about the infrigment, it's not like they sent a bunch of threatening lawyers...

They have also contributed a lot to Django

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/dec/11/django-awar...

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source...

The headline doesn't mention "dollars" at all.

Not even implicitly?

That's true. If we are being pedantic, though, it does mention an amount ("half a million"), which turns out to be the number of dollars they awarded ($539,000). So I will stand by statement that the headline mentions the "dollar amount." :-)

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