Germany to Fund Open Source Software Maintainers Through New Fellowship Program
Germany to Fund Open Source Software Maintainers Through New Fellowship Program
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund unveils a program to fund maintainers of open source projects that's expected to be operational by year's end.
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Imagine if they could one day get the whole EU to agree on something like this...and to even use the software! 😵
EU has a similar program called Horizon Europe, which spent around €95.5 billion so far. Though it's broader in scope, not limited to just software, but includes various open source research too.
Would love if there was open source software hard budgeted in there on an EU level...
There has been for years: NLNet. It just got suspended by right-wingers. A lot of European projects were relying on it.
Lemmy development was funded by NLNet by the way.
What? Crap, that's bad news
NLNet
The main problem with these Funds, especially European ones, are the inability of the people running the funds to properly identify technologies and direct funding to the right projects. If you have ever taken a look at NLNet's projects you will find how there's a 20:1 ratio of projects that are like "Errrr... okay" versus "Yes, that's a useful thing to fund". It also doesn't help the case that a noticeable amount of the funded projects appear relatively low in activity already.
For example, NLNet is funding bringing an extremely niche and largely irrelevant Android ROM to an even more niche phone and helping it release an update (?!?), while on the other hand you cannot find any support for a smartphone-related project that makes actual sense. I'd argue that there are plenty more successful "de-googled" Android ROMs that have a better track record and a larger user base than Replicant. And I'd also argue that there are a lot more reasonable Pinephone projects (cough cough Camera cough) to sponsor than bringing Android to it to make it.... another Android phone?
Horizon Europe
Horizon on the other hand has a different focus. It is not an open-source fund, but a broad "technology research" fund that ventures into health, environmental and many more areas. Horizon is very much politically driven. One famous example is the Horizon 2021-2022 programme agenda, which they unfortunately deleted, that describes HORIZON-CL3-2021-FCT-01-02: Lawful interception using new and emerging technologies (5G & beyond, quantum computing and encryption). Horizon is the very initiative that ProtonMail received funding from, btw.
Long story short, I don't think more funds and programs are needed, but rather a different way of how the existing ones are being run. From what I see, in many cases funds either completely miss the target, or they suffer from NIH syndrome when there are existing alternatives.
They just allocate according to different logic than the mainstream american FOSS ideology. For instance, hackerbros, and you seem to say the same, will tell you that resources should be centralized into the biggest project in its own category to add more and more features to it. Regardless of cooptation from the private sector, this is generally a bad idea. It leads to a monoculture and monoculture leads to critical bugs impacting enormous amount of users. Also it's predicated on the idea that there should be only a single way to fullfill a specific use-case, and that it's the same throughout the world, erasing cultural, economic, social, biological and political differences. Optimization requires standardization, standardization requires erasure and suppression of minoritarian voices and it's therefore oppressive. Maximizing it is not a good idea, both for technical, political and ethical reasons.
Seeding new projects that better fit local contexts, or simply produce diverse alternatives raises diversity and in turns raises resilience of the software ecosystem as a whole.