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Comment by N-Krause | Hacker News Reader

But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason. I am not saying that ladybird or manifest v3 are the reason, I just notice a lot of new energy in the not-just-chrome category and wonder what the other reasons might be.

Andreas Kling is pretty open about his reasons to have started the ladybird project and I just know Servo from his monthly videos and a few other sidenotes, so I was surprised that it gained so much traction after being basically dead.

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> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

Igalia is generally pro open-source, and Servo certainly aligns with their ethos, but a lot of the money came from Futurewei / Huawei who are interested in Servo because it's not US based, and therefore they are actually able to contribute to it (they are effectively banned from contributing to Chrome/Firefox/Safari due to US sanctions). There is now also funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund who are also interested in a "European browser" (and NLnet, but they fund all sorts of things)

Thanks, that are the insights I was hoping to get.

As I understand it, funding was provided by NLnet[1], a longstanding Dutch non-profit that focuses on supporting open internet technologies. The funding was provided specifically for reviving Servo. By the looks of it, the money itself mostly comes from the EU, which has various grant programmes to fund open access technology, digital sovereignty, etc. Given several Servo contributors worked for Igalia, I expect they submitted a proposal to NLnet for them to fund Servo development, and it was successful.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/

> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

> I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason.

Igalia is a very peculiar company. I would not rule out "it's a good thing for the commons and we bet we'll get some upside eventually" as the reason.

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