$15,000 is 3% of the total money
Mozilla awarded to open source projects this time round. These points are already considered by the
MOSS Selection Committee:[footnote]https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS#Selection_Criteria[/footnote]
Will this grant make a significant impact on the project?
Is the level of funding appropriate for the task to be accomplished?
Chances are the Selection Committee saw it as a low risk funding that could yield some benefits regardless of whether they agree with use of the term slave or not. After all, the money is also going towards making "improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud."
Also, this isn't the first time this discussion has turned up either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_%28technology%29#Appropriateness_of_usage
Personally I'm more disgusted at the $75,000 going towards
Mercurial, but that's just my preference for
Git shining through.
EDIT: Added point about the
MOSS Selection Committee's criteria.