Phaser awarded $50,000 from MOSS Program
I have been wanting to write about this for ages.
As some of you may know, back in April I applied to MOSS, the Mozilla Open Source Support program. The application was to help fund the completion of Phaser 3. I'm happy to be able to announce that Mozilla accepted my application and have awarded the Phaser project $50,000.
I wanted to tell you all sooner but it took several months to get the contract finalised. Then, just as that was completed my whole world was turned upside down by our bank when this happened. To say it has been a roller-coaster few months is an understatement. My bank very nearly killed off my business, Phaser and the MOSS award with it. Still, I'm not here to dwell on what may have been. The situation with the bank is resolved and I can now look to the future and explain what the MOSS award means for Phaser.
How the money is awarded
As you would expect, you don't just get a check in the mail. As part of the application I agreed a list of features that Phaser 3 would have and a set of milestone dates assigned to releases. The MOSS award is paid out in 3 instalments linked directly to those milestones, if Mozilla are happy that we have achieved what we said we would. The first payment is due at the end of September, aligning with Beta 2. The next with the official v3 release and the final payment 2 months after that.
For the first 9 months of this year development was paid for directly through a combination of the money my company earned from client work mixed with your generous contributions on Patreon. The award from Mozilla will heavily offset the amount we need to withdraw from my company savings, which basically ensures we get a clear 6 months worth of unhindered development - a fantastic amount of time. Of course we still need to pay office rent, hosting and other miscellaneous bills not covered by the award - but the salary of the core team is covered in full, and that's a great feeling to have!
Mozilla kindly agreed that the money will cover us up to the release of Phaser 3 and then 2 months worth of post-release support after it. This will be in the form of resolving bugs, maintenance versions and creating tutorials and guides for the community. We explained that often the most intense work comes right after release, when everyone starts using it and finding the edge cases and issues we didn't notice before. I'm very glad Mozilla agreed.
This is an incredible opportunity for us. To have our own belief in Phaser reinforced by the Mozilla team, who deem it an important enough open source project to award us this money, is a wonderful validation. As you can imagine I was close to heart broken when it looked like the issues with our bank were going to pull the rug away from under our feet at the last moment - but it really feels like justice has been served. Phaser was always about and always for the community, and that has been proven a hundred times over this week.
We will carry on working hard to ensure Phaser 3 is the best version there has ever been. We've always believed in what we were building, you clearly have too and now with Mozilla's help we can aim straight for the end goal.
Let's do this thing.
Tags
I have been wanting to write about this for ages.
As some of you may know, back in April I applied to MOSS, the Mozilla Open Source Support program. The application was to help fund the completion of Phaser 3. I'm happy to be able to announce that Mozilla accepted my application and have awarded the Phaser project $50,000.
I wanted to tell you all sooner but it took several months to get the contract finalised. Then, just as that was completed my whole world was turned upside down by our bank when this happened. To say it has been a roller-coaster few months is an understatement. My bank very nearly killed off my business, Phaser and the MOSS award with it. Still, I'm not here to dwell on what may have been. The situation with the bank is resolved and I can now look to the future and explain what the MOSS award means for Phaser.
How the money is awarded
As you would expect, you don't just get a check in the mail. As part of the application I agreed a list of features that Phaser 3 would have and a set of milestone dates assigned to releases. The MOSS award is paid out in 3 instalments linked directly to those milestones, if Mozilla are happy that we have achieved what we said we would. The first payment is due at the end of September, aligning with Beta 2. The next with the official v3 release and the final payment 2 months after that.
For the first 9 months of this year development was paid for directly through a combination of the money my company earned from client work mixed with your generous contributions on Patreon. The award from Mozilla will heavily offset the amount we need to withdraw from my company savings, which basically ensures we get a clear 6 months worth of unhindered development - a fantastic amount of time. Of course we still need to pay office rent, hosting and other miscellaneous bills not covered by the award - but the salary of the core team is covered in full, and that's a great feeling to have!
Mozilla kindly agreed that the money will cover us up to the release of Phaser 3 and then 2 months worth of post-release support after it. This will be in the form of resolving bugs, maintenance versions and creating tutorials and guides for the community. We explained that often the most intense work comes right after release, when everyone starts using it and finding the edge cases and issues we didn't notice before. I'm very glad Mozilla agreed.
This is an incredible opportunity for us. To have our own belief in Phaser reinforced by the Mozilla team, who deem it an important enough open source project to award us this money, is a wonderful validation. As you can imagine I was close to heart broken when it looked like the issues with our bank were going to pull the rug away from under our feet at the last moment - but it really feels like justice has been served. Phaser was always about and always for the community, and that has been proven a hundred times over this week.
We will carry on working hard to ensure Phaser 3 is the best version there has ever been. We've always believed in what we were building, you clearly have too and now with Mozilla's help we can aim straight for the end goal.
Let's do this thing.
Tags