Open-Source Grant Programme Powered By Engine Yard

Engine Yard, a cloud computing platform-as-a-service provider for Ruby on Rails, has announced a new effort to support innovative open source developers, called the Engine Yard Open Source Software (OSS) Community Grant programme.

The initiative aims to help key projects and OSS contributors gain traction while growing their user base and contributor base, and helping to ensure that these projects have a longterm success with the broader community.

Paying Back To The Community

“Engine Yard believes passionately in the value of open-source software and this programme is an example of our commitment to the community,” Nic Williams, vice president of technology at Engine Yard, said in a statement. “We want to ensure critical open-source projects have long-term, healthy lives and OSS contributors can successfully grow their user and contributor bases.”

The Engine Yard OSS Community Grant programme will help developers evangelise their projects to the community by funding attendance and speaking engagements at conferences, marketing and documentation assistance, and more, Engine Yard officials said.

Mitchell Hashimoto and Yehuda Katz are the first two recipients of aid from the fund.

Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open-source projects, such as Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, such as Thor. He also is working on the SproutCore open-source JavaScript framework as an employee of Strobe.

Mitchell Hashimoto is the creator of Vagrant, which is a tool for building and distributing virtualised development environments. Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to build configurable, lightweight and portable virtual machines dynamically.

“Vagrant automates the creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox,” Hashimoto said in a statement. “By providing easy-to-configure, lightweight, reproducible and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments, Vagrant helps developers maximise productivity and flexibility.”