mCaptcha - Open Technology Fund grant application - July 2022

Funding
12

Minor points of improvement:

  • General: a space before your “(” chars :wink:
  • At Sysadmins: “Infrastructure as Code” → “Infrastructure-as-Code”
  • Webmasters: “…will help webmasters configure optimal…”
  • Webmasters: “there are no resources to guide…” → besides the survey, do you also intend to write a documentation guide? You might mention that explicitly.
  • In adoption section: “infrastructure as code” … consistent spelling.

Reformulate for clarity:

  • The commercial offering will be based on 100% FOSS software

  • The commercial offering will be based on the Free Software project, and the entire mCaptcha codebase is guaranteed to remain 100% FOSS.

I don’t really know what “under the mCaptcha banner” means in light of the previous of commercial offering, so:

  • In effect, the software distributed under the mCaptcha banner should be sufficient to enable anyone to set up a parallel commercial offering.

  • The mCaptcha software distribution, can be obtained and adapted by anyone for commercial use, in accordance to the license terms.

In terms of adoption you might add:

“I will use the production deployments of mCaptcha at Gitea and Codeberg as convincing showcases in pitches to a wide range of similar clients that are likely candidates to adopt this technology.”

mCaptcha was a personal project until Codeberg started showing interest. The response was mostly positive, but there were a few missing bits that will greatly improve mCaptcha. For instance, a Codeberg user requested a feature to get an estimated time to solution to indicate ongoing validation.

mCaptcha started as a personal project, and until I started collaborating with Codeberg, I had validated with a small group of people at university with the expertise to help. When the work at Codeberg started we iterated together in quick succession. I received a lot of positive feedback, but also identified areas where we have opportunity to bring major improvement. For example in user experience, by adding a feature that shows the estimated time to solution as a progress indicator to the user.

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