Funding for Free Software Projects
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EDRI ☛ European Commission cuts funding support for Free Software projects
The Next Generation Internet initiative has supported Free Software projects with funding and technical assistance since 2018. Despite its proven success, the European Commission made the decision to cut this funding in the current draft for the Horizon Europe 2025 Work Programme. This decision highlights the larger problem of the lack of motivated and sustainable public funding for Free Software projects.
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Phrack ☛ Calling All Hackers
Based on what we've set up so far, I will discuss some of the problems I see with many startups today and with startup culture.
Much of the problems stem from misalignment between shareholders and the other stakeholders (employees, etc). A lot of this comes from the fundamentals of venture capital. VC is itself an asset class, like fixed income and equities. VCs pitch this to their limited partners, at some level, based on the premise that their VC fund will generate yield for them. The strategy is to identify stuff that will become huge and buy it while it's still small and really cheap. Like trading shitcoins, it's about finding what's going to moon and getting in early.
In a typical VC fund, a small handful of the investments will comprise the entire returns of the fund, with all of the other investments being 0's. The distribution is very power law. This means we are not looking for 1x, 2x, or 3x outcomes; these may even be seen as failure modes. We are only interested in 20x, 50x, 100x, etc. outcomes. This is because anything less will be insufficient to make up for all the bad investments that get written down to zero.