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Finance for Free Software in Europe
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ EU-STF for funding critical Open Source
Current digital infrastructure is to a large degree built on layers and layers of Open Source.
Open Source is to a large degree built and maintained by enthusiasts or other financially and resource restrained teams.
It should be in our mutual interest to make sure that well-used Open Source projects not only survive, but also perform well.
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Open Forum Europe ☛ By: Nicholas Gates, Jennifer Tridgell, Rosa Maria Torraco, Carsten Schwäbe, Felix Reda, Andreas Hummler, Thomas Streinz, Astor Nummelin Carlberg, and Knut Blind Funding Europe's Open Digital Infrastructure: A Study on the Economic, Legal, and Political Feasibility of an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF) [PDF]
Chronic under-investment in open source technologies creates systemic risks – exposing Europe to (amongst other things) cybersecurity threats, supply chain vulnerabilities, and strategic dependencies on non-European technology providers. In order to maintain, secure, and improve existing open source technologies to meet the EU’s public and industrial goals, it requires policymakers to understand the logics underpinning failures in investing in the maintenance of open source technologies as open digital infrastructure, in order to prioritise the use of public policy towards the unlocking of financial and non-financial resources that support the open source ecosystem.
The EU-STF is envisioned as a scaled-up, pan-European, and mission-driven initiative with a proposed budget of at least EUR €350 million over seven years to invest in maintenance, security, and improvement of key open source components, as well as help identify and map dependencies and invest in ecosystem strengthening activities. It is vital that the EU-STF embodies some key principles (many of which have made the German successful): pooled financing, low bureaucracy, political independence, flexible funding, community focus, strategic alignment, and transparency.
To this end, it has been determined that two active budgetary scenarios are worth considering for the EU-STF: (1) a standalone and centralised fund (e.g. a new funding body created by legislation and set aside via the MFF negotiations), and (2) a hybrid/shared management structure (such as leveraging established EU institutional frameworks like the EDIC that allow for pooled contributions of Member States alongside EU funding, and even industry co-financing). These options are not necessarily mutually exclusive either. No single approach offers the most viable path and each has its own advantages as well as trade-offs.
Microsoft corruption:
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GitHub Wants the EU to Fund Open Source [Ed: Microsoft wants to attack Free software via GitHub, using politicians it is now bribing [1, 2]