We're pleased to announce that Django has been chosen as one of the first projects to receive funding from theMozilla Open Source Support program.

We've been awarded $150,000 to help fund the development of Channels, the initiative to rewrite the core of Django to support (among other things) WebSockets and background tasks, and to integrate key parts of the Django REST Framework request/response code into Django, such as content negotiation. Together, these projects will help considerably improve Django's role of backing rich web experiences as well as native applications.

The work on Channels is already ongoing - you can read thecurrent documentation for the external version being used to develop the API and design patterns - but we will soon move to start integrating it more directly into Django itself.

We'll be funding Django core developers, other community members and subject specialists to help with development; Channels encompasses more than just WebSocket support for Django, and will include things like background task support, scaling tools, community feedback, and, of course, documentation.

There's no exact timeline for the project yet, but keep an eye on thedjango-developers mailing list for updates as work progresses.

We're very grateful to Mozilla for pioneering this funding program; it's a fantastic step forward in the funding of Open Source, and a great step in the ongoing process of developing and expanding Django's feature set.