The project, called Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers, aims "to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders," explained Shruthi Sreekanta, technical program manager at Google, in a blog post.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, which gets at least $500,000 annually from Google for its platinum membership fee [PDF], said the browser foundation support group will "provide much-needed funding and development support for open development of projects within the Chromium ecosystem," without specifying the source or amount of that funding.
According to Sreekanta, Google last year made more than 100,000 commits to the Chromium code base, representing about 94 percent of the contributions. Google's hope is that other organizations building their browsers on Chromium will step up their contributions.
