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The European Union must keep funding free software

pad.public.cat

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Re: The European Union must keep funding free software

#5

Post by newsclues »

andsoitis wrote: post #2

I wonder why the list of signatories at the bottom do not seem to include a single government (local or national).

Governments need to band together and collaborate to develop software.

But instead they tend to buy closed systems that are developed by the same companies churning out crud.

Re: The European Union must keep funding free software

#6

Post by bell-cot »

newsclues wrote: post #5
andsoitis wrote: post #2

I wonder why the list of signatories at the bottom do not seem to include a single government (local or national).

Governments need to band together and collaborate to develop software. But instead they tend to buy closed systems that are developed by the same companies churning out crud.

Ideally, governments are competent.

Realistically...competent governments are the exception. And competent-at-long-term-technology-policy governments are virtually non-existent.

Re: The European Union must keep funding free software

#8

Post by mananaysiempre »

tomcam wrote: post #3

It would be interesting to see what they got out of the first €27 million they put into it.

PyPy received an EU grant sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, although it had to be a different one. If I understood TFA correctly, NLnet is partially funded by this money? NLnet itself distributes money to very cool software things[1]—some moonshots such as Spectrum[2], some very down-to-earth and usable ones such as Nitrokey[3]. A discussion[4] linked in a neighbouring comment also mentions Sourcehut and Bcachefs.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

[2] https://spectrum-os.org/

[3] https://www.nitrokey.com/

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044

Re: The European Union must keep funding free software

#9

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

I am not sure what to make of the EU’s agenda on free software. On the one hand, we see provinces of some countries announcing open source adoption strategies. On the other hand, we see controversial regulation on things like AI that basically proposes to pull up the ladder and give the market to incumbents.

Re: The European Union must keep funding free software

#10

Post by FjordWarden »

Money is a limited resource and I don't think NGI has proven to be a good investment. They made the same sort of embarrassing mistakes your average VC fund would make like BS blockchain ideas. A lot of uninspiring "research" where some of the deliverables is some open source software that no one ever uses and for which development stops after funding runs out. There seems to be something rotten about the open source "community" funded by the EU. I never going to forget the scene of NLnet members distributing free t-shirts with their logo on it to random attendees of the CCC congres in Berlin and then taking a big group photo for some social proof they can put on their website. All in the name of free and open source software that respects EU democratic values, that is pro-social narcissism for you right there.
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