The Mozilla Foundation, which supports the development of the Firefox browser, announced recently that it would contribute $1 million to various open-source software projects under the auspices of the new Mozilla Open-Source Support program.

The foundation says that it’s looking to hand out money to as many as 10 projects, in amounts in the range of $10,000 to $250,000. The grant winners will be announced at the Mozilla coincidental work week scheduled for mid-December in Orlando, which is, in effect, the organization’s holiday party.

The idea, the foundation said, is to give back to the projects that make Mozilla possible – whether by providing code that Mozilla uses in its products, or creating the tools project members use to do their jobs, or even underpinning the group’s infrastructure, Mozilla relies on a huge range of different open-source projects to function.
By giving back, Mozilla wants to both recognize these projects’ past contributions and ensure that they’re healthy for the future, so that they can continue to provide support.

Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in an official blog post that the time had come to step up Mozilla’s financial contributions to the free and open-source software community.