There was a grant in 2023 which was supported by the European Comission. So I think the topic itself isn't entirely unknown.
https://nlnet.nl/project/Forgejo/
> We are seeking project proposals between 5.000 and 50.000 euro's — which should get you on your way.
Am I the only one to think this is completely ridiculous amount of money?
So, you want me to leave my very well paid job to innovate for the sake of EU competitiveness but you don't to invest more than 50k EUR (max grant). And as an individual you don't even stand a chance so this 50k EUR has to be distributed across several people. Did I get this right?
Ah, and I almost forgot about the double standards ... the same EU commission is on a spending spree when it comes to the development of a fkn EU website which you use to apply for these funds. Each Brussels-based developer doing that very innovative work is paid ~100k EUR. What a blasphemy.
No, they don't want to you leave your very well paid job for this grant, they want to chuck a few bounties at some FOSS projects and pay for some people to attend hackathons or conferences if they can fill in a form giving sufficiently compelling reasons. How dare they!
You're missing my point. "Chucking in a few bounties" is very different from what this topic is about. Let me spell it out for you once again:
> The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors.
The point you expressed was indignation at FOSS bounties paid by the Fediversity project out of a fraction of a single EUR 3m EU grant their consortium won being less than the full time salary of EU devs.
If you were trying to more widely insinuate that this third party dosing out small-to-modest incentives to individuals to do a bit of hacking on Fediverse stuff was the only thing the EU was doing to support Open Source or represented some sort of ceiling on the amounts EU-funded projects working on FOSS could pay their developers, it would be even more wrong.
Plenty of valid criticisms of the EU's cyber non-dependence strategy or the detail of grant and equity funding programmes for research and building stuff and how they weight FOSS (that's part of the reason for the consultation!) but you need to have the slightest idea what exists to get into those...
I took the Fediversity project as an example because it was mentioned above in the comment and not an example of something I wanted to specifically point it. Truth to be told 90% of other EU funds are similar if not the same in the context of grants, and no, I don't find it sufficient, and no, I don't think such strategy will yield anything worth the salt. You will keep the developers have fun with their projects but something worthwhile? Forget. It doesn't exist at such minuscule scale.
The only bigger denominator in terms of funds is Horizon which is completely political, and not worth mentioning at all, if that's what you wanted to suggest. It also operates under minuscule scale in terms of grants (up to 2.5M over 2 years) or funding (1-30M). No possibility for seed rounds which implies you already must be in the business and already have an almost viable product ready to deploy to the market tomorrow (EU bureaucracy calls it TRL6-8). This is all ridiculous and shows how detached from reality people making decisions there are. They even hire "experts" to weigh your application for which you know ... ta-da ... have to hire yet another "expert" to write that application for you. 100s of pages to prove your idea worthy. Once a year. World innovation runs at much much higher pace.
So, sure the R&D environment in EU is built on a very fertile ground and Brussels is doing their best to "call for an evidence" because open-source software is going to save the economy??? Right.
I'm currently a participant under a NLNet grant. I'm unemployed at the moment so getting a trickle of 1-2K of donation money per month working on my passion project is a pretty decent proposition.
You can also be a participant alongside your well paid job, because once the memorandum of understanding is signed you have a year to work through the proposal at your own pace, during weekends or moonlighting.
I don't doubt that at all and I'm glad for anyone who is managing to make some money from their open-source contributions, even more so in today's age where market is so volatile. I am being empathetic for that cause. But the point I am rather trying to convey is that this is not the strategy that will converge to something substantial that will make EU more competitive on global landscape.
I don't know how I could convince you, or anyone that's educated under the American capitalist system, that working for a commons is better in aggregate than relying on companies to pay for innovation and then keeping it a secret. "Competitive" is a slur in my opinion, I'd rather my work be "useful".
Working on things that make you happy instead of pushing the agenda of your employers, which in majority is unethical, immoral, or plainly unhealthy, is dystopian? It sounds utopian to me. :)
As much as I used to hate them, I've now gained an appreciation for PayPal for this kind of stuff. For when I don't want to give my credit card to yet another vendor to possibly be compromised, or manage a sketchy subscription, PayPal is a pretty good solution. I do prefer Apple, but not every subscription can be bought that way.
Sometimes, but not always. As long as the difference is not too significant, the control over the subscription is worth it to me. Some people don't like 'em, I get it, but when you stay primarily inside their ecosystem it does work pretty seamlessly for most things.
Yeah PayPal is pretty good here. There's a page that lists all your billing subscriptions and you can cancel them right there.
It's a shame credit cards don't offer the same thing (Chase is able to list them all but provides no contact information or ability to revoke authorization)
The two banks I use provide information about your subscriptions and allow you to cancel any of them with a click of a button. I'm not in the US though (relatively poor "global South"); sometimes it pays to get technology with a significant delay.
One of them can also create zero-cost virtual Visa Golds in a couple of minutes. If I need to use a really sketchy service, I simply create a throwaway card, put a bit of cash there, pay for what I need, and then delete the card.
I think setting up a server isn't the real problem. The bigger problem is the idea of using discord for an open source community when there are solutions like IRC or Matrix which are actually open source. Not to mention that discord is going to start showing ads.
Another issue is that the article mentions using forums, which is a bad idea. Using forums the information is limited only to members of the discord server. Good luck finding something on google if it isn't even indexed.
Also here are some previous discussions on the same subject
