Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Has Invested Over $24.9M In Open-Source In Two Years

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than $24.9 million into sixty open technologies. This effort backed by the German government has provided nearly $25 million USD in open-source funding over the past two years. In this time there has been more than 500 submissions proposing over 114 million euros in work.

This Sovereign Tech Funding has helped open-source projects provide much needed maintenance to their software, enhance the security posture of the software, and make other open-source improvements in the public interest. You can learn more about the Sovereign Tech Fund via their blog.

Re:

[Retired Chemist]

Open-source programs do not make large campaign contributions.

Good on them!

[jenningsthecat]

I remember when a couple of German cities transitioned to Linux. The first went back to Windows in order to suck up to Microsoft, but then a few years later started moving back to Linux. Now the country is funding Open Source initiatives. Good stuff.

I wish our so-called leaders in North America would get a clue and start moving away from rental-only software. I still think there's room for proprietary closed-source software. But there needs to be really strong and vigorously enforced legislation around it. None of this rental crap - only sales of licences would be allowed. And all of the source needs to be held in escrow by the government against the time when the company either discontinues the product or goes bankrupt.

Re:

[PPH]

Was going to point out the same thing.

How many flip-flops can they do for $25 mill?

Glad they realize funding is necessary still.

[OneOfMany07]

Just curious how effective that money was spent too. Meaning anyone can spend any amount of money if they really try to...

Is there a 'best practices' way to do that? Guessing 'measure before, decide on change, do change, measure after' would be a good start. Though some situations probably aren't easy to measure (so what should we do that isn't 'make up something'?).

Re:

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Just curious how effective that money was spent too. Meaning anyone can spend any amount of money if they really try to...

Is there a 'best practices' way to do that? Guessing 'measure before, decide on change, do change, measure after' would be a good start. Though some situations probably aren't easy to measure (so what should we do that isn't 'make up something'?).

Linked in TFA is (in english): Feasibility Study https://www.sovereigntechfund.... [sovereigntechfund.de] Evaluation Report Pilot Phase https://www.sovereigntechfund.... [sovereigntechfund.de]

Microsoft's expenses are 136B/year

[FeelGood314]

25 million is nothing. It's not worth getting excited about in anyway. Plus, if the funding is anything like how the Canadian government funds software 20 million of it was wasted with a wink wink as the agency giving the money patted itself on the back for giving the money away. 6 million then went into administrative bullshit applying for the money.
If anything tangible was produced, that wouldn't have already been produce, I would be shocked.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

The idea is that they pay for the software development once & everyone gets to benefit from it as well as make further contributions to making it better for everyone. It's a fraction of the cost for better software that they can then afford to give away for free. Everyone, except predatory proprietary software companies, wins! The €billions that governments all over the EU have already poured into dysfunctional software is the reason for their "FOSS first" directive, i.e. they have to prioritise FO

Re:

[BlueLightning]

In the grand scheme of things it doesn't seem like a lot - but to the projects who got funded through this it has been huge. I'm involved in the Yocto Project and in exchange for some time in filing the paperwork and working with contractors (many of whom are active community members who also need to make a living) we got a bunch of features implemented that otherwise would not have been.

Re:

[Elektroschock]

Say, the STF is a little nucleus that distributes some pocket money. But a nucleus of actual public investment.