2026 Community Sponsorships
Mocha has been a staple of the web development ecosystem for over a decade. Over those years, it’s received over $200,000 in financial contributions, and continues to receive tens of thousands of dollars a year from its many generous donors. We are grateful to have been able to pay our maintainers well, and we recognize that very few open-source projects are in this position.
However, the Mocha project is no longer cutting edge or under significant feature development. We believe the approximately $90,000 in our Open Collective balance would be better spent on more modern, active projects that don’t receive consistent donations the way Mocha does.
Today, we are happy to announce that Mocha will be donating $5,000 each to four different community projects, for a total of $20,000 donated to the modern JavaScript community. This works to match our Collective Funds Guidelines recommendation of donating 20% to dependencies and community projects. We made these donations a few days ago, and all have now been fully processed.
Projects We’re Sponsoring
Section titled “Projects We’re Sponsoring”Our criteria for sponsoring a project were projects that:
- Mocha and its users directly benefit from
- Have been under active development and maintenance for >1 year
- Are not already funding us or any projects our maintainers are receiving sponsorship from
- Are truly independent and open source (not primarily backed or owned by a company)
Additionally, we ensured that each project could significantly benefit from more funding, and we were happy to find that all candidates used Open Collective for transparency. Mocha has directly benefited from the contributions of each of these projects, and we’re proud to support their ongoing development.
Knip has become the standard tool in web development for decluttering JavaScript and TypeScript projects. It’s helped us as well as many other projects catch all sorts of unused code and dependencies. In doing so, Knip both improved our ease of developing Mocha as well as reduced the amount of code we ship to users.
Node.js is the most popular JavaScript runtime and the primary way users run Mocha.
It is mature and stable, as well as the only major JavaScript runtime that is truly independent (its financial entity is the OpenJS Foundation, a 501(c)(6) nonprofit).
Node.js sets the standard for how server-side users run JavaScript, and we’re happy to have collaborated with them on recent changes such as require(ESM).
Prettier is the de facto standard for formatting in JavaScript. We use it in Mocha on all of our source files to eliminate time wasted debating or manually applying whitespace preferences. Prettier continues to lead the ecosystem for research and development into how to properly format web code.
The unified collective manages a large suite of packages and specifications for managing content and structured data. This includes MDX, the language powering the content of mochajs.org and many other sites, as well as assorted tools such as remark that process Markdown for other tools. Much of the modern Markdown tool chain is powered by unified.
More Sponsorships To Come
Section titled “More Sponsorships To Come”This will not be the only set of community sponsorships to come out of Mocha over the next few years. After Mocha 12 finishes releasing this fall, we plan on taking another look at the ecosystem and setting up larger and/or recurring sponsorships. We look forward to “paying it forward”–both figuratively and literally–to help other projects push forward the practice of web development.
Conclusion
Section titled “Conclusion”Thank you, as always, for your continued financial contributions that have made this donation possible. We encourage you to support any of the projects above directly, as they all do amazing work.
For any and all feedback, please reach out on Discord 🤎