Categories: General

Mozilla Gives $385,000 to Open Source Projects as part of MOSS “Mission Partners” Program

For many years people with visual impairments and the legally blind have paid a steep price to access the Web on Windows-based computers. The market-leading software for screen readers costs well over $1,000. The high price is a considerable obstacle to keeping the Web open and accessible to all. The NVDA Project has developed an open source screen reader that is free to download and to use, and which works well with Firefox. NVDA aligns with one of the Mozilla Manifesto’s principles: “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”

That’s why, at Mozilla, we have elected to give the project $15,000 in the inaugural round of our Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) “Mission Partners” awards. The award will help NVDA stay compatible with the Firefox browser and support a long-term relationship between our two organizations. NVDA is just one of eight grantees in a wide range of key disciplines and technology areas that we have chosen to support. Others are:

  • Tor (a system for using a distributed network to communicate anonymously and without being tracked): $152,500. This award will be used to significantly enhance the Tor network’s metrics infrastructure so that the performance and stability of the network can be monitored and improvements made as appropriate.
  • Tails (a secure-by-default live operating system aimed at preserving user privacy): $77,000. This award will be used to implement reproducible builds, making it possible for third parties to independently verify that a Tails ISO image was built from the corresponding Tails source code.
  • Caddy (an HTTP/2 web server): $50,000. This award will be used to add a REST API, web UI, and new documentation, all of which make it easier to deploy more services with TLS
  • Mio (an asynchronous I/O library written in Rust): $30,000. This award will be used to make ergonomic improvements to the API and thereby make it easier to build high performance applications with Mio in Rust.
  • DNSSEC/DANE Chain Stapling (standardizing and implementing a new TLS extension for transport of a serialized DNSSEC record set): $25,000. This award will be used to complete the standard in the IETF and build both a client-side and a server-side implementation.
  • Godot Engine (a high-performance multi-platform game engine that can deploy to HTML5): $20,000. This award will be used to add support for Web Sockets, WebAssembly and WebGL 2.0.
  • PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search): $15,500. This award will permit face-to-face collaboration among the remote team and bring the software to beta status.

MOSS is a continuing program. The Mission Partners track has a budget for 2016 of around US$1.25 million. We look forward to supporting more projects in the coming months. Applications remain open both for Mission Partners and for the Foundational Technology track (for projects creating software that Mozilla already uses or deploys) on an ongoing basis.