If EU funding can create and sustain a thriving free software ecosystem I suspect it would require a new funding model that we haven't seen yet. Otherwise, why would they do it and how would the institution detect if it was working?
ActivityPub <> Discourse, WordPress
bcachefs
CryptPad
F-Droid
Jabber/XMPP
Jitsi
LibreOffice
Matrix
Mastodon
NextCloud
PulseAudio
QubesOS
SourceHutAnd how does all this funding compare to something like the Google's Chrome & Firefox? That is one company controlling the majority of web traffic through OSS that on balance respects user freedom. To me, that is a better funding model with better results.
Funding use cases may well be a good use of time, but given the serious issues the EU has establishing itself in the tech industry, the military and economic crisis they have managed to waddle in to and the general political turmoil that seems to have kicked up I opine it is not the time to be wasting political bandwidth like this note calls for. The US model of letting companies fund and build software (including free software) seems a bit stronger, more flexible and politically easier to coordinate.
We don't need all of Europe to come together and work out who they think is the best team to build web technologies. Google puts a team on it and it probably happens. There are worse ideas out there than calls for government funding but it just doesn't sound effective to me - these continent-spanning governance bodies don't have the bandwidth to pull off this sort of delicate technical work.
I actually read the budget proposals and look at the year over year breakdown for certain categories.
The amount my town is paying for microsoft365 and GIS software is substantial. While not an eyewatering amount, and I can understand that certain things need to be licensed....its hard to understand why my local town isn't using a FOSS GIS and just setting up a basic proxmox cluster with HA failover to host the darn thing.
Half the projects go no where, a quarter have some meaningful output with varying levels of adoption, and a quarter are amazing & loved bits of work.
Theres folks asking if we are getting out moneys worth. First, $27m just doesn't seem like all that much. Especially for such a broad array of nations. Second, the hit ratio is never going to be perfect; worrying about how every dollar is spent will insure you never ever have good research & development, will insure only lukewarm mild takes get tried. You have to be willing to fund adventerous stuff; that's what VCs for example bank on. Because it's impossible to tell, because trying to be smart ahead of time breeds mediocrity. And this r&d&maintenance funding: it buys not only the fruits of that labor, but it maintains a dynamic & empowered culture across the region. It curates talent & starts efforts & intensives the best parts of it's software world.
NLnet is so exceedingly important. There's so much possible good that humanity so rarely can get up to. NLNet has been one of core & best ways to promote making things better. This vision of human possibility is saintly & sovereign. I hope EU can keep it going.
Or, it might end up that self-driving vehicles are an infrastructure problem and that they need dedicated roadways without incursion by non-self-driven cars. Perhaps we could set them up to run on dedicated schedules on electrified metal causeways with shared ridership.
> car and computing companies could contribute their existing software to a open source consortium that would be government-sponsored, but privately run.
So basically it would just be a normal company, but the government pays them? In what way should the gov decide which company to fund, and why? If it is a commercial/private company, their existence should be justified by their profits. I don't really get it.
It makes sense for the government to fund R&D that the private sector won't fund, possibly because it would be profitable for the overall economy but not for any one company. Obviously a dozen companies are already building self-driving so that doesn't apply.
But instead they tend to buy closed systems that are developed by the same companies churning out crud.
Realistically...competent governments are the exception. And competent-at-long-term-technology-policy governments are virtually non-existent.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970985
You can pretend that grant money doesn't fund the writing of grant applications, but that won't make it true. If you make your criteria stricter and less reliable, then every project has to spend more overhead on crossing the Ts and dotting the Is to ensure their entire budget doesn't fall out from under them.
But the problem with research is... it's hard to predict where it takes you. At some point you realize that the project you got funding for is a dead end, but you can do a really cool spinoff that becomes successful but is not technically the same project.
Another problem with research is that a lot of it is exploitation. You can't get a grant for just exploring random things and seeing what happens. But at the same time is a vital part of research - so official grants need to fund a lot of "underground" research, that may or may not mature into an official product. It's hard to estimate is a money is well spent by looking just at the official projects.
... And yes, many of projects are actually wasteful. Bureaucrats are really bad at estimating what counts as a valuable project and what is actually a sham moneygrab. In our case we are known for delivering so we often "win" when we start, but often random shell companies with the hype of the week come dangerously close.