MOSS/Talking About Your MOSS Award
So you've been awarded a MOSS award - congratulations! The continued viability of the MOSS program depends on people continuing to apply, and Mozilla continuing to want to fund it. Both of these things are assisted if you mention MOSS positively when you talk about the MOSS-funded work you are doing or the audit you had, whether in a blog post, conference talk or other medium. People who hear your talk or read your blog post may want to apply, and Mozilla is more likely to continue to fund the program if it can see that it generates positive goodwill for Mozilla, and that we get appropriate recognition for the money we are awarding.
- Please don't start telling the world you've been awarded a MOSS award until after the contract is fully signed by all parties. (Your contract signer should be notified when this happens.) While we want very much to make all the awards we approve, this way, no-one ever gets disappointed or misled.
- Please refer to it as a MOSS "award", not a MOSS "grant" or MOSS "contract". The word "grant" is not appropriate for some types of award, and we like to keep the language neutral. So this means you were "awarded" it, not "given" it.
- The first time you mention MOSS, expand the acronym. So:
We recently were awarded a Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) award to improve our API documentation. MOSS is a program from Mozilla...
- If your project got an SOS Fund audit, use instead "an audit from Mozilla's SOS Fund".
- The best URL to link back to is https://mozilla.org/moss . That link works for all award types, is a professional-looking site rather than a wiki, and helps people get their heads around the program.
- If you are able to, please include the call-to-action with words something like the following:
MOSS has a number of types of award, which are open to different sorts of open source/free software project. If your project is looking for financial support, do check <a href="https://mozilla.org/moss">the website</a> to see if you qualify.
If you are uncertain about how to talk about your MOSS award, please do contact Gerv who would be happy to help you.