13 ms·

The European Union must keep funding free software

142 points by tr4656 2y ago

walterbell 2y ago
"FOSS funding vanishes from EU's 2025 Horizon program plans", 20 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044
andsoitis 2y ago
I wonder why the list of signatories at the bottom do not seem to include a single government (local or national).
- newsclues 2y ago
  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.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    Ideally, governments are competent. Realistically...competent governments are the exception. And competent-at-long-term-technology-policy governments are virtually non-existent.
    - newsclues 2y ago
      I understand the current state but also think it’s possible to change.
      - gallagos 2y ago
        We just gotta wine and dine some suits. Sounds easy.
  - fijiaarone 2y ago
    No one ever took a government out to a fancy dinner and drinks to convince them to use open source.
    - newsclues 2y ago
      Even if it would save governments money and help ensure civil servants get paid on time (phoenix payroll scandal)? Never had a meal from a sales rep that swayed my mind
tomcam 2y ago
It would be interesting to see what they got out of the first €27 million they put into it.
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  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 https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html [2] https://spectrum-os.org/ https://spectrum-os.org/ [3] https://www.nitrokey.com/ https://www.nitrokey.com/ [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Thank you. I was looking for something like a table with a project, maybe a summary, amount funded, KPIs, and ideally an assessment of the results.
    - mstef 2y ago
      this is a recent (1-2 months old) report on the impact of the NGI0 programme: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257ae66f-23c7-11ef-a195-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-324755022 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257... there was also a fosdem talk about this, if you prefer AV to text, finding it i leave as an exercise to the interested parties...
    - iudqnolq 2y ago
      They seem to have prioritized making the process simple for developers by removing overhead. Apparently you are don't have to write lots of reports about your results for them, they just check that the code you said you'd write is in fact written and runs.
DaoVeles 2y ago
Even they only use free software as a fall back, that is a worth while investment.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970985
FjordWarden 2y ago
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.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  >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. You can pretend that grant money doesn't fund the writing of grant applications, but that won't make it true. If you make your criteria stricter and less reliable, then every project has to spend more overhead on crossing the Ts and dotting the Is to ensure their entire budget doesn't fall out from under them.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  As someone often on the receiving end of that money... It's complicated. My organization is doing a lot of great things and it's appreciated both nationally and internationally. Some of that work is funded from EU grants (including H2020 before). But the problem with research is... it's hard to predict where it takes you. At some point you realize that the project you got funding for is a dead end, but you can do a really cool spinoff that becomes successful but is not technically the same project. Another problem with research is that a lot of it is exploitation. You can't get a grant for just exploring random things and seeing what happens. But at the same time is a vital part of research - so official grants need to fund a lot of "underground" research, that may or may not mature into an official product. It's hard to estimate is a money is well spent by looking just at the official projects. ... And yes, many of projects are actually wasteful. Bureaucrats are really bad at estimating what counts as a valuable project and what is actually a sham moneygrab. In our case we are known for delivering so we often "win" when we start, but often random shell companies with the hype of the week come dangerously close.
dhosek 2y ago
I was thinking earlier today that self-driving automobiles would be a good use-case for a public-private venture for open source software development. My half-baked idea would be that car and computing companies could contribute their existing software to a open source consortium that would be government-sponsored, but privately run. Some fair valuation would be set for their contributions and the OSS license would require anyone using the software to contribute back their changes. Part of the funding mechanism would be that any self-driving vehicle would have a fairly high “tax” per vehicle (maybe $10K, 20K?) but that this could be prepaid by the manufacturer through software contributions. Yes, I know there are bottomless logistical issues to be worked out, but the idea being that perhaps, if everyone can see exactly what everyone else is doing we can maybe get out of the current pit of semi-working solutions that prevent true autonomous vehicles from being viable. Or, it might end up that self-driving vehicles are an infrastructure problem and that they need dedicated roadways without incursion by non-self-driven cars. Perhaps we could set them up to run on dedicated schedules on electrified metal causeways with shared ridership.
- sva_ 2y ago
  Not sure if you're implying that the government is supposed to oversee/manage the development of such a project, but I think they're extraordinarily bad at such things. It isn't the role of the gov either. > car and computing companies could contribute their existing software to a open source consortium that would be government-sponsored, but privately run. So basically it would just be a normal company, but the government pays them? In what way should the gov decide which company to fund, and why? If it is a commercial/private company, their existence should be justified by their profits. I don't really get it.
  - wmf 2y ago
    In what way should the gov decide which company to fund, and why? If it is a commercial/private company, their existence should be justified by their profits. It makes sense for the government to fund R&D that the private sector won't fund, possibly because it would be profitable for the overall economy but not for any one company. Obviously a dozen companies are already building self-driving so that doesn't apply.
Kenji 2y ago
[dead]
roenxi 2y ago
Well worth reflecting that relatively little of existing free software seems to come from that sort of funding. It is mostly commercial companies following commoditise-the-complement strategies, consultancies building free tools then supporting them, or research spinoffs. If EU funding can create and sustain a thriving free software ecosystem I suspect it would require a new funding model that we haven't seen yet. Otherwise, why would they do it and how would the institution detect if it was working?
- walterbell 2y ago
  Some projects funded by NLnet, https://nlnet.nl/project/ https://nlnet.nl/project/ ActivityPub <> Discourse, WordPress bcachefs CryptPad F-Droid Jabber/XMPP Jitsi LibreOffice Matrix Mastodon NextCloud PulseAudio QubesOS SourceHut
  - roenxi 2y ago
    That list seems a bit lacking substance and slightly off target. NLNet doesn't claim to fund libreoffice for example - that was a Sun office suite, picked up by the Apache foundation and now controlled by the Document Foundation (mainly through general donations if I understood their financial reports). NLNet seems to be funding things like "encrypted collaborative editing in the browser [using libreoffice]" which is a different kettle of fish. Nice option to have, but fairly niche functionality in the LO suite as far as I know. And how does all this funding compare to something like the Google's Chrome & Firefox? That is one company controlling the majority of web traffic through OSS that on balance respects user freedom. To me, that is a better funding model with better results. Funding use cases may well be a good use of time, but given the serious issues the EU has establishing itself in the tech industry, the military and economic crisis they have managed to waddle in to and the general political turmoil that seems to have kicked up I opine it is not the time to be wasting political bandwidth like this note calls for. The US model of letting companies fund and build software (including free software) seems a bit stronger, more flexible and politically easier to coordinate. We don't need all of Europe to come together and work out who they think is the best team to build web technologies. Google puts a team on it and it probably happens. There are worse ideas out there than calls for government funding but it just doesn't sound effective to me - these continent-spanning governance bodies don't have the bandwidth to pull off this sort of delicate technical work.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
My town had a budget vote not to long ago. I actually read the budget proposals and look at the year over year breakdown for certain categories. The amount my town is paying for microsoft365 and GIS software is substantial. While not an eyewatering amount, and I can understand that certain things need to be licensed....its hard to understand why my local town isn't using a FOSS GIS and just setting up a basic proxmox cluster with HA failover to host the darn thing.
- cen4 2y ago
  Cuz when things need tweaking or break, there is usually no one to call. FOSS solutions are fine when there is some internal evangelist or team pushing it and are willing to support and maintain things (which over time usually comes out of some labor budget). If there is no one like that internally, even very simple issues can put people off using these systems.
- packetlost 2y ago
  Because paying people who know how to do that properly are pretty expensive? The average local MSP is paying $25/hr for people who are either early career or flunked out of college or were too incompetent for a corporate job at a larger employer. AD/O365 is pretty easy to get going on a reasonable scale without much
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
It's ridiculously short sighted to cancel this stuff. NLnet in particular is by far one of the most impressive & broadspanning places for innovation & development in the software world in general, and vanguard for open source at large. The benefits are so multi-fold. Half the projects go no where, a quarter have some meaningful output with varying levels of adoption, and a quarter are amazing & loved bits of work. Theres folks asking if we are getting out moneys worth. First, $27m just doesn't seem like all that much. Especially for such a broad array of nations. Second, the hit ratio is never going to be perfect; worrying about how every dollar is spent will insure you never ever have good research & development, will insure only lukewarm mild takes get tried. You have to be willing to fund adventerous stuff; that's what VCs for example bank on. Because it's impossible to tell, because trying to be smart ahead of time breeds mediocrity. And this r&d&maintenance funding: it buys not only the fruits of that labor, but it maintains a dynamic & empowered culture across the region. It curates talent & starts efforts & intensives the best parts of it's software world. NLnet is so exceedingly important. There's so much possible good that humanity so rarely can get up to. NLNet has been one of core & best ways to promote making things better. This vision of human possibility is saintly & sovereign. I hope EU can keep it going.
pljldos 2y ago
[flagged]

142 points by tr4656 2y ago

"FOSS funding vanishes from EU's 2025 Horizon program plans", 20 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044

andsoitis 2y ago

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

newsclues 2y ago
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.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  Ideally, governments are competent. Realistically...competent governments are the exception. And competent-at-long-term-technology-policy governments are virtually non-existent.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    I understand the current state but also think it’s possible to change.
    - gallagos 2y ago
      We just gotta wine and dine some suits. Sounds easy.
- fijiaarone 2y ago
  No one ever took a government out to a fancy dinner and drinks to convince them to use open source.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    Even if it would save governments money and help ensure civil servants get paid on time (phoenix payroll scandal)? Never had a meal from a sales rep that swayed my mind

tomcam 2y ago

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

mananaysiempre 2y ago
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 https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html [2] https://spectrum-os.org/ https://spectrum-os.org/ [3] https://www.nitrokey.com/ https://www.nitrokey.com/ [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044
- tomcam 2y ago
  Thank you. I was looking for something like a table with a project, maybe a summary, amount funded, KPIs, and ideally an assessment of the results.
  - mstef 2y ago
    this is a recent (1-2 months old) report on the impact of the NGI0 programme: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257ae66f-23c7-11ef-a195-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-324755022 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257... there was also a fosdem talk about this, if you prefer AV to text, finding it i leave as an exercise to the interested parties...
  - iudqnolq 2y ago
    They seem to have prioritized making the process simple for developers by removing overhead. Apparently you are don't have to write lots of reports about your results for them, they just check that the code you said you'd write is in fact written and runs.

DaoVeles 2y ago

Even they only use free software as a fall back, that is a worth while investment.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970985

FjordWarden 2y ago

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.

Qwertious 2y ago
>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. You can pretend that grant money doesn't fund the writing of grant applications, but that won't make it true. If you make your criteria stricter and less reliable, then every project has to spend more overhead on crossing the Ts and dotting the Is to ensure their entire budget doesn't fall out from under them.
poincaredisk 2y ago
As someone often on the receiving end of that money... It's complicated. My organization is doing a lot of great things and it's appreciated both nationally and internationally. Some of that work is funded from EU grants (including H2020 before). But the problem with research is... it's hard to predict where it takes you. At some point you realize that the project you got funding for is a dead end, but you can do a really cool spinoff that becomes successful but is not technically the same project. Another problem with research is that a lot of it is exploitation. You can't get a grant for just exploring random things and seeing what happens. But at the same time is a vital part of research - so official grants need to fund a lot of "underground" research, that may or may not mature into an official product. It's hard to estimate is a money is well spent by looking just at the official projects. ... And yes, many of projects are actually wasteful. Bureaucrats are really bad at estimating what counts as a valuable project and what is actually a sham moneygrab. In our case we are known for delivering so we often "win" when we start, but often random shell companies with the hype of the week come dangerously close.

dhosek 2y ago

I was thinking earlier today that self-driving automobiles would be a good use-case for a public-private venture for open source software development. My half-baked idea would be that car and computing companies could contribute their existing software to a open source consortium that would be government-sponsored, but privately run. Some fair valuation would be set for their contributions and the OSS license would require anyone using the software to contribute back their changes. Part of the funding mechanism would be that any self-driving vehicle would have a fairly high “tax” per vehicle (maybe $10K, 20K?) but that this could be prepaid by the manufacturer through software contributions. Yes, I know there are bottomless logistical issues to be worked out, but the idea being that perhaps, if everyone can see exactly what everyone else is doing we can maybe get out of the current pit of semi-working solutions that prevent true autonomous vehicles from being viable. Or, it might end up that self-driving vehicles are an infrastructure problem and that they need dedicated roadways without incursion by non-self-driven cars. Perhaps we could set them up to run on dedicated schedules on electrified metal causeways with shared ridership.

sva_ 2y ago
Not sure if you're implying that the government is supposed to oversee/manage the development of such a project, but I think they're extraordinarily bad at such things. It isn't the role of the gov either. > car and computing companies could contribute their existing software to a open source consortium that would be government-sponsored, but privately run. So basically it would just be a normal company, but the government pays them? In what way should the gov decide which company to fund, and why? If it is a commercial/private company, their existence should be justified by their profits. I don't really get it.
- wmf 2y ago
  In what way should the gov decide which company to fund, and why? If it is a commercial/private company, their existence should be justified by their profits. It makes sense for the government to fund R&D that the private sector won't fund, possibly because it would be profitable for the overall economy but not for any one company. Obviously a dozen companies are already building self-driving so that doesn't apply.

Kenji 2y ago

[dead]

roenxi 2y ago

Well worth reflecting that relatively little of existing free software seems to come from that sort of funding. It is mostly commercial companies following commoditise-the-complement strategies, consultancies building free tools then supporting them, or research spinoffs. If EU funding can create and sustain a thriving free software ecosystem I suspect it would require a new funding model that we haven't seen yet. Otherwise, why would they do it and how would the institution detect if it was working?

walterbell 2y ago
Some projects funded by NLnet, https://nlnet.nl/project/ https://nlnet.nl/project/ ActivityPub <> Discourse, WordPress bcachefs CryptPad F-Droid Jabber/XMPP Jitsi LibreOffice Matrix Mastodon NextCloud PulseAudio QubesOS SourceHut
- roenxi 2y ago
  That list seems a bit lacking substance and slightly off target. NLNet doesn't claim to fund libreoffice for example - that was a Sun office suite, picked up by the Apache foundation and now controlled by the Document Foundation (mainly through general donations if I understood their financial reports). NLNet seems to be funding things like "encrypted collaborative editing in the browser [using libreoffice]" which is a different kettle of fish. Nice option to have, but fairly niche functionality in the LO suite as far as I know. And how does all this funding compare to something like the Google's Chrome & Firefox? That is one company controlling the majority of web traffic through OSS that on balance respects user freedom. To me, that is a better funding model with better results. Funding use cases may well be a good use of time, but given the serious issues the EU has establishing itself in the tech industry, the military and economic crisis they have managed to waddle in to and the general political turmoil that seems to have kicked up I opine it is not the time to be wasting political bandwidth like this note calls for. The US model of letting companies fund and build software (including free software) seems a bit stronger, more flexible and politically easier to coordinate. We don't need all of Europe to come together and work out who they think is the best team to build web technologies. Google puts a team on it and it probably happens. There are worse ideas out there than calls for government funding but it just doesn't sound effective to me - these continent-spanning governance bodies don't have the bandwidth to pull off this sort of delicate technical work.

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

My town had a budget vote not to long ago. I actually read the budget proposals and look at the year over year breakdown for certain categories. The amount my town is paying for microsoft365 and GIS software is substantial. While not an eyewatering amount, and I can understand that certain things need to be licensed....its hard to understand why my local town isn't using a FOSS GIS and just setting up a basic proxmox cluster with HA failover to host the darn thing.

cen4 2y ago
Cuz when things need tweaking or break, there is usually no one to call. FOSS solutions are fine when there is some internal evangelist or team pushing it and are willing to support and maintain things (which over time usually comes out of some labor budget). If there is no one like that internally, even very simple issues can put people off using these systems.
packetlost 2y ago
Because paying people who know how to do that properly are pretty expensive? The average local MSP is paying $25/hr for people who are either early career or flunked out of college or were too incompetent for a corporate job at a larger employer. AD/O365 is pretty easy to get going on a reasonable scale without much

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

It's ridiculously short sighted to cancel this stuff. NLnet in particular is by far one of the most impressive & broadspanning places for innovation & development in the software world in general, and vanguard for open source at large. The benefits are so multi-fold. Half the projects go no where, a quarter have some meaningful output with varying levels of adoption, and a quarter are amazing & loved bits of work. Theres folks asking if we are getting out moneys worth. First, $27m just doesn't seem like all that much. Especially for such a broad array of nations. Second, the hit ratio is never going to be perfect; worrying about how every dollar is spent will insure you never ever have good research & development, will insure only lukewarm mild takes get tried. You have to be willing to fund adventerous stuff; that's what VCs for example bank on. Because it's impossible to tell, because trying to be smart ahead of time breeds mediocrity. And this r&d&maintenance funding: it buys not only the fruits of that labor, but it maintains a dynamic & empowered culture across the region. It curates talent & starts efforts & intensives the best parts of it's software world. NLnet is so exceedingly important. There's so much possible good that humanity so rarely can get up to. NLNet has been one of core & best ways to promote making things better. This vision of human possibility is saintly & sovereign. I hope EU can keep it going.

pljldos 2y ago

[flagged]