Help Us Money-ify UglifyJS 2.0

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In nature, an ecosystem consists of the organisms, raw materials, and all of the complex interactions that shape their shared environment. The open source ecosystem is no different. Each project has its niche, and any package that is a dependency of course has dependencies of its own. jQuery is used on millions of websites, but we wouldn’t be there without the excellent tools on which we rely to build, test, and distribute our code.

One such tool is Mihai Bazon’s excellent UglifyJS. We’ve been using Uglify to compress jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile for nearly two years now, so if you’ve used any of our minified builds recently, you’ve benefited from Mihai’s work. Recently, he began work on UglifyJS 2.0, which will feature even better compression, support for source maps, and a command line utility. He also announced a Pledgie campaign to support his efforts.

Here at the Foundation, our goal is not just to improve libraries that start with “jQuery,” but rather the entire JavaScript ecosystem in which we all participate. That’s why we’re happy today to announce some exciting news – and to issue a challenge!

We’ve just kicked in 500€ to the campaign to recognize his work so far, but there’s more we all can do. If the community can help us to help Mihai reach his goal of 3,000€  by the end of September, we’ll donate an additional 500€ to the UglifyJS 2.0 project!

We’re looking forward to keeping you posted on the progress here, and participating in similar endeavors in the future to help improve the tools we use each day. In the meantime, thanks for considering a donation (even a small one), and if we haven’t convinced you yet, perhaps this final exhortation will: THINK OF THE BYTES!

Update (5:30): Awesome! The Dojo Foundation has matched our donation!