Application testing company Sauce Labs has announced Sauce Free Open Source Software accounts (known affectionately as "Open Sauce") — a new initiative to give developers free and unlimited use of the Sauce Labs cloud for testing web applications.

In keeping with the community-driven model, Open Sauce user test results will by default be publicly viewable on Sauce Labs.

"We [ourselves] benefit from open source software and we are significant contributors to open source projects like Selenium, Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM), and WD.js," said John Dunham, CEO of Sauce Labs.

"Our business depends on open source and so we want to 'pay it forward' by giving back to the open source community whenever possible. For example, Sauce Labs offers free use of our service to the Selenium Project, which uses us for integration testing of new Selenium releases."

Dunham suggests that this move to open source comes at about the right time for his company. The benefit is likely to be felt by developers of open source projects having web-facing components or which use JavaScript.

Sauce Labs offers automated and manual testing services for web and mobile web applications using a platform based on the Selenium open source software project.

NOTE: Selenium is a suite of tools specifically for automating web browsers. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes and provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language (Selenium IDE).

The Sauce Labs system includes nearly 100 browser-operating system combinations, including the iOS and Android platforms for mobile web app testing. The Sauce automated testing service and Sauce manual testing offerings, such as Sauce for Mac, are used by organizations of all sizes. The Sauce testing cloud — a custom, instant cloud built and maintained by Sauce — executes two million tests each month.