We’ll tell you how companies plan to split the grant amount and talk about other situations where open source developers received significant financial and material support.
Photos - Lucas Favre - UnsplashGrant purpose
Mozilla, Creative Commons and startup Coil have launched the Grant for the Web program and plan to distribute $ 100 million between content makers and open source projects that receive support and rewards for their work without the use of banner ads.
The fact is that the effectiveness of this method of monetization has long been questioned - almost half of Internet users use ad blockers.
This development option is also “supported” by regulators. New bills relating to the use of cookies, personal data and, accordingly, programmatic advertising, complicate the work with classic advertising tools. Next year, the European Parliament should approve the ePrivacy Regulation, which will expand the possibilities of GDPR. They plan to adopt similar norms in other countries - for example, the
USA ,
India and Russia.
All this suggests that it’s time for Internet resources to switch to alternative ways of monetizing content on the network. And Mozilla, Creative Commons and Coil are ready to support this trend.
How to divide the money
The distribution of funds
will be
handled by a specially formed advisory council, which will include representatives of all three organizations. They will select projects for financing.
The whole amount will be
divided into five parts - each year $ 20 million will be
distributed between software developers with open licenses. For example, micropayment systems based on
Web Monetization can become one of the directions. This is the API standard for browsers, which involves replacing advertising revenue with small payments from users of the resource. The standard has already been
submitted to the W3C
for review .
Also, engineers from Coil
say that relatively small payments (from one to one hundred thousand dollars) will be received by developers of sites that produce open content.
Opinions
Mozilla actively supports open source projects that help develop the Internet. The company has its own program called
Open Source Support . In 2017, Mozilla already issued $ 539 thousand to develop open source solutions. For example, funding was
received by the authors of the Webpack loader, as well as the developers of the 2D engine for designing Phaser HTML5 games and the mod_md module, which simplifies HTTPS deployment.
Representatives of the Mozilla Foundation say that working with Coil and Creative Commons and investing in Grant for the Web is an opportunity to further develop the Internet and alternative methods of monetizing content. No banner ads on sites.
But there are those who were skeptical of the new initiative. One of the residents of Hacker News
noted that $ 100 million is not enough to cover the income from advertising on the network and modify the economy of the Internet. However, even the Mozilla CEO
says this task is too ambitious and has never been a grant goal. He hopes that the collaboration of the three organizations will draw attention to the issue of privacy and cookies on the Internet. And third-party companies will begin to develop alternative approaches to working with advertising.
Other Free Software Grants
Grants for the development of free software are also paid with the aim of developing other areas. In mid-summer, Epic Games
allocated $ 1.2 million to support the Blender Foundation, an organization that develops software of the same name for 3D computer graphics. A grant for Blender was provided as part of the Epic MegaGrants initiative.
Graphic designers, students, teachers, developers of tools for Unreal Engine and other open projects can apply for financing under this program. The total fund of the program is $ 100 million. Note that at about the same time, Blender
received support from another large company - Ubisoft.
Photos - Richard Balog - UnsplashGrants are also given for the development of free exchange of data. In mid-September, the California Digital Library (CDL)
received $ 2.2 million from Arcadia Fund. The money will be used to launch a platform that will serve as a hosting for scientific articles and journals. In the future, she will offer tools for the exchange of knowledge between employees of American universities and will contribute to the development of the scientific community.
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