> What type of tech projects, budget and success do you expect the EU commission to fund? Are there previous successes that could be emulated, from the EU or other governments? Google was created by private investors, as was Skype.
I'm not sure why you think the EU should be wasting bandwidth on this given that you are (accurately) identifying that it isn't managing to marshal much capital or following a model that leads to notable successes. The focus should be on incubating more successful strategies. The way to get good OSS ecosystems is a web of companies making money off open source software. That is how we get things like Linux, Chrome or Postgres.
> Successful delivery of hundreds of projects doesn't count?
Not really, no. Especially if the projects are already being funded by a government program - give me a budget and I can fund a thousand github projects. When you tried to list successes, you put together a list with names like XMPP or WordPress on it. And don't misunderstand me, I like XMPP and Wordpress; but they are not strategically useful to a body like the EU.
> Are you comparing nonprofit project budgets of a few thousand euros to corporate VC/investment budgets that are orders of magnitudes larger?
Yep. And it is unimpressive. It doesn't look like a close race to me, efforts via NLnet are feeble compared to the US approach, where they pour in orders of magnitude more effort and get much bigger payoffs.
The EU has a problem - no companies. They should solve that problem, not make random microdonations - there is no particular evidence that is powerful, at least not that I've seen. There is evidence that corporations are powerful at producing OSS though.