It was my pleasure and honor to be able to give the PyPy guys that grant. Here's to the next year!
How are the the PyPy developers supporting themselves? Are they being paid salaries from the project, which (if I understand correctly) is currently being funded as an EU research project?
Obviously the PyPy code will deliver vastly more than $10k of value to the world. Keep up the good work.
I will let the pypy folks themselves speak to their funding - but as for the 10k, it is a small investment in a much larger project to be sure.
Some of us (myself included) are volunteers. Others have it as their day job, by virtue of funding from the German and Swedish government. These funds will probably be used to allow devs to work on PyPy full time, as well as to bring devs to sprints.
This years Pycon has given PyPy very good exposure, I heard lots of chatter of guys wanting to try it out in production.