I have to agree that there are ambitious projects did not turn out well (like FireFox OS, Persona and a few others) and there are ones still thriving but the community is not quite as impacting as the authors intended. There are also ones did make good impact with very little noise like django-secure got merged into Django 1.6.
Rust is probably the most notable project built by Mozilla after Firefox at this current stage.
They just gave up on Persona too soon. It was going to be an incremental change, not an overnight revolution, but I imagine they never each approached major juncture points for developers (github, stack overflow, etc) about adopting it.
I tried Persona, great concept, the adoption rate was differently very slow. I don't know if they ever reached out to large players and encourage them to adopt, but I think believe even if GitHub did, that wouldn't matter much. Mozilla did not want to keep running Persona as the sole IdP in the Persona platform, it did only to encourage development and early adoption. Even internally I don't think all sites went to Persona, but the large one differently did though. With that attitude I was fearing a major migration which could kill motivation.
"Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud."
I don't think the documentation part of that is gonna take 15k USD.
