postmarketOS selected for NGI Zero Core funding / The European Union must keep funding free software
Quoting: postmarketOS // selected for NGI Zero Core funding / The European Union must keep funding free software —
We have applied for a grant from NLnet's NGI Zero Core fund and it has been accepted! It will allow us to spend significant additional hours on improving support for PipeWire, iwd, systemd, a proof of concept for immutable rootfs and the next two postmarketOS releases (v24.12 and v25.06). All with the overall goal of making postmarketOS more reliable and usable for non-technical users. We are very grateful and eager to get started!
We originally planned to make this announcement together with the next monthly blog post, which will come in a few days. But unfortunately we have learned that the European Commission did not mention the Next Generation Internet programmes anymore in their draft of funding programmes for 2025. We are deeply saddened about this, because NGI and NLnet have been funding over a thousand free and open source software projects and we consider it critically that this will also be done in the future.
A small but very important part of that is what they have done for Linux Mobile. NGI invested in projects from postmarketOS multiple times, Cell broadcast support for the Linux Mobile Stack, Maemo Leste, Mobile NixOS, Mepo and Replicant on Pinephone 1.2 just to name a few.
In other words, NGI has made a dramatic impact to improve our sustainable, privacy and attention respecting Linux Mobile ecosystem. One of the very few answers we have to the duopoly of Android and iOS from Silicon Valley.
Update
Also see:
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KDE signs petition urging European Union to continue funding free software
The European Union must keep funding free software
Initially publishead by petites singularités. English translation provided by OW2.
If you want to sign this letter, please publish this text on your website and add yourself or your organization to the table you will find on the original
Open Letter to the European Commission
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls).
Quite a few of KDE's projects have benefited from NGI's funding, including NeoChat, Kaidan, KDE Connect, KMail, and many others. KDE e.V. is a European non-profit with limited resources that relies on donations, sponsors and funding like that offered by NGI, to push the development of our projects forward.
FOSS Force:
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Is the European Commission Dropping Support for Important Open-Source Funding? - FOSS Force
In something of an editorial on its website, the postmarketOS community has announced concern that the European Commission has failed to mention Next Generation Internet programs in its draft of the projects it’s going to fund in 2025. NGI is an EC initiative that has an ambitious mandate to build a trustworthy internet. One of the methods it uses for doing this is funding over a thousand FOSS projects through its NGI Zero Commons Fund.
PostmarketOS, which develops an eponymous Alpine Linux-based distribution for mobile devices, finds it disturbing that the Commission might be dropping NGI. That’s understandable, because even though NGI funds open-source projects accross-the-board, some of those funds have been going specifically into Linux mobile development to fund projects that includes postmarketOS (“multiple times,” the project said), cell broadcast support for the Linux Mobile Stack, Maemo Leste, Mobile NixOS, Mepo, Replicant on Pinephone 1.2, and others.
NixOS:
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Open Letter to the European Commission
Initially published by petites singularités. English translation provided by OW2.
If you want to sign the letter, please re-publish the original letter on your website and add to the list of signatories.
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to supporting the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure.