Donations Turned One Servo Maintainer Into a Full-Time Engine of Change
One Year of Sponsored Servo Development
Last September, the Servo project funded long-time maintainer Josh Bowman-Matthews part-time through OpenCollective and GitHub donations. In his first-person retrospective, he details the impact: 8 new maintainers nominated, 1150 pull requests reviewed, 114 issues filed for newcomers (92% fixed), and new documentation on borrow hazards, experimental features, and test failures. He also supported a large-scale rewrite of Servo's JS engine integration and helped stabilize flaky tests.
This role I’ve carved out means a lot to me—I’ve found a healthy balance that allows me to spend time with my family as well as make meaningful contributions to Servo, and I get to spend a lot of time looking for ways to make the project more accessible for others.
- NLnet
NLnet has been sponsoring large blocks of Servo development as well. Filter with 'servo' in the list here: https://nlnet.nl/project/
- throwa356262
Any idea how much this has cost them?
Some non-profits have their HQ in the valley and pay SF salaries when they could just as well have paid a fraction of that to a very competent developer elsewhere.
- flossly
I really wish a patron would step up and sponsor this project. Not just by money, but also by plugging it in their browser-carrying products. Maybe Hauwei of Samgsung; they now sling a browser derived of another for-profit --usually competitor-- company's browser.
- QwenGlazer9000
I'm glad we have an alternative to ladybird, since I haven't been a fan of the direction of the project for a bit.
- macic
The Hurd of browser engines
- computersuck
Servo uses mozjs which is just rust bindings for SpiderMonkey which is still C++.
All this effort to use rust and yet they would not rewrite the JS engine which is the biggest attack surface for memory vulns.
- vyaa
Congrats on the successful year!
- evolve2k
Non ai post as top post. We did it guys!
But seriously, it’s nice to see other news on here.
Important we keep covering broader tech things.