JemmyEuropean Commission cuts funding support for Free Software projects
db0edri.org/our-work/european-commission-cuts-fund…
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The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside.
Good old AI bubble strikes again.
It's a justification, they know full well it's not some future revolution.
But it's a very good device to hijack discourse and funds.
It seems obvious that people who get to the top are smart, just not in the good way. They know the potential of various technologies. If they don't understand the subjects themselves, they have hundreds of experts willing to lecture them. Even if they pretend to not have understood a word, in fact they do gain knowledge.
Yeah, after what happened to Greece it's hard to forget how the EU is heavily infiltrated by the vultures of private finance.
Just vultures. It's pure corruption. People of the kind that already rule Russia.
Any kind of progress, justice, right etc they don't respect.
Big fish eating smaller fish is one thing they respect, and they also want more privacy while stealing, and the ability to spy after everyone else and coerce courts and institutions.
It's that simple.
Agreed. We have allowed our democratic system to be quietly stolen from us without even really noticing. I think we either need to properly reclaim it or to start new systems away from it. The Fediverse is a really good example of the latter.
The fediverse exists in the web, while they exist in the reality and command police, people in airports and train stations, military, internet service providers, etc.
I would argue that the web is part of reality - it's our main method of communication. It might be small but I think it's a good example of successful self-organisation away from government/business/finance.
That's why we should follow the example of the French and do a Revolution every now and then!
Hawala awaits :-)
Was ist das?
It's informal way of transferring the money. You give your money to Hawalardar which contacts the Hawalardar in the destination country. That person gives back the money minus fee which you pointed out or any person who knows the code. It works like money transfer but outside the formal payment system. That's why it's hated by most governments in the world. In many countries it has names like in China "flying money"
As long as public money -> public code, this could potentially be a net positive for stopping predatory AI practices from Microsoft and buddies. Still, taking away funding from other projects could also be catastrophic for everything else.
If there are any French or Germans in particular reading this please share on your numerous native instances: If you are in the EU you need to contact policy makers (as outlined in the article) about this. I'm sorry I can't be with you on this one but Brexit.
The beauty of high level corruption is that local peasants can't do much about it.
Good news is that Germany for example if trying to get away from corpos and use OSS, so at least we know within german government there are people who [see] this issue properly.
Unfortunately your information seems a little outdated. It’s true that Germany did try it for a moment until Microsoft showed up with suitcases of money in the chancellor office so to speak and he announced to essentially move away from open source again.
Though on the federal level, there‘s still some hope. Maybe.
You are talking about Limux which started 2 decades ago, but there are other initiatives to enforce oss software in german government.
And also the same who wrote the bundes trojaner :-) ( I know it's most likely the German intelligence but still funny )
Ouf, that's a rough blow!
Yea. One of my project is funded through ngi currently 😭
Did you just apply for it?
No we're already accepted, but I would have liked to renew it eventually.
No I meant, what was the grant process? As in, just applying for it, or selected for it?
Yes you have to apply for it and it's a long process afterwards with multiple stages. Go check https://nlnet.nl and they explain it.
apfelwoiSchoppenWeren't there recently EU calls for using open source software in government applications due to concerns about proprietary software like Windows in the wake of *gestures generally at Windows*?
MegaTravellerYes, there are calls to move towards OOS, but as I assume that is it. Only calls. I remember cities moving onto open source and than thanks for lobbyists moving back to proprietary software again.
I remember cities moving onto open source and than thanks for lobbyists moving back to proprietary software again.
What you remember is the news cycle covering the City of Munich switching from Windows to Linux, then another news cycle about how they're moving back to Windows.
What didn't get much coverage though, is that Microsoft did a (suspected under-table) deal with the outgoing government to switch back to Windows if Microsoft built an office in Munich.
What then happened is the new government came in, looked at the situation, and cancelled it (although MS may have built that office always). Right now Munich is still using Linux and still actively rolling it out.
The money is needed for funding the police to implement chat control's and going dark's enforcement.
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠Even sadder:
The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside.
Read about this on the site of the garage project. they apparently wouldn't be a thing without this funding.
Recently set up a cluster and it's great. Sad to hear this went through
Well, they still can't underfund gnu privacy guard :-) It's pretty much already finished product and working pretty well.
Eh? I tried it about a year ago, and I found all the same clunky problems that were there 20 years ago.
clunky
Thunderbird + kleopatra? K-9 + OpenKeyChain ( android )? Where did you have issues?
I went through an exercise with a few other developers to see if we could use it for transferring sensitive information. I was using Windows w/WSL2 at the time (now I'm full Linux for my work machine), and I believe the other two were on Macs.
Our conclusions were that while it might be useful alongside other ways, it was too clunky to use in general. One of the more useful things we could do is have developers sign git commits.
The email plugins for various clients make it easy to mistakenly think you're sending an encrypted email. When even technical people are making this mistake, then it's a big issue for widespread adoption. The plugins also don't always send it in a format that works for every client out there. We found the most consistent way was to encrypt the message in a file and attach it to the email.
The plugins don't work with modern webmail, anyway.
Public key servers are unreliable. They're largely maintained by volunteers, so this is understandable, but we couldn't recommend that the company use them. If we wanted reliability, we'd need to run our own internal keysever.
Then there's the key signing meetings we'd need to have. Even technical people find these a bother. These are, unfortunately, inherent to the web of trust model.
I really wanted to make it work. The decentralized nature of the web of trust--as opposed to the hierarchical model of TLS--is appealing to me personally. But this shit hasn't gotten better in 20 years, and at least some of it is unfixable.
The email plugins for various clients make it easy to mistakenly think you’re sending an encrypted email.
Ok. Now I know what's the issue but this is not the problem with gpg. Nah, gpg integration with thunderbird is so flawless that it clearly says when it's encrypting when not. Also you can see the raw email content and then you see whether it's plaintext or ciphertext. I'm using thunderbird with gpg very often so I know how it works nicely with gpg
It's a problem with the gpg ecosystem. No matter what code is actually responsible, it prevents us from using it in practice. We're not going to switch our whole email system and clients just for this.
We implemented this at work using Hashicorp Vault for PKIs and a dovecote smtp server to pass IMAP from whatever client our endusers were using. The only problem was clients using the O365 webportal in unsupported or outdated browsers, but we took care of that with SCCM.
https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/tutorials/secrets-management/pki-engine
https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/mail_crypt_plugin/
https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/forwarding_parameters/
US Mega corps really getting good at lobbying within EU.
This is likely related to DACH countries trying to get off mega corp's tit. just a speculation though.
But mega corp never goes down without corruption and crime! You can take that one to the bank.
They have lots of money for corporate software from Microsoft though.
cygnusDamn, rare technology L from the EU. Hopefully they walk back this decision.
BentiGorlich
Gsus4Is it as vague as "funds for AI" or cloud computing capacity to keep up with China and the US? Because we could use that in the EU. But who would be operating it, Universities? MIC?
The state won't save you.
Gotta make space for dat AI stuff ya know. Cuz thats the future n shit.
Ye, this is so new we might forget siri existed in 2010
VoltageDeleted by moderator
oh absolutely, not any less Ai powered tho
English is not my primary language. Was the 'r word' a slur? I thought it meant someone who is stupid.
InternetCitizen2What a disappointment. The value of OSS should be obvious to all by now. We have too many people in power who don't know anything about the technology they regulate.
Here is a list of funded projects:
If anybody wants to look depper into their claim of "proven success".
I browsed through it shallowly and didn't find any project that I know/use, nor were the projects which I have randomly clicked on any interesting, when they had a working, usable result at all and not just designs or proof of concepts.
I know it sounds cynical, but I honestly don't mean it negatively. I just wanted to look a bit into it because their claims seemed without substance to me.
But as I said I only looked at it very shallowly so far.
I actually found a ton of projects that I have at least heard of
(but I agree about 80-90% are either "bringing activitypub to xyz" or "hardware proof of concept (in theory)", "secure/encrypted/crypto-or-other-buzzword-related xyz"),
so here goes:
Armbian - OS for SBCs, loosely inspired by Raspbian
Bluetuith - a TUI bluetooth client
Briar - Secure messaging, apparently better than Signal (funding ended 2020)
Forgejo - The new Gitea
Fractal - A Matrix Client (funding ended in 2022)
FSF - Free Software Foundation (funding ended in 2008)
FSF Europe - Free Software Foundation Europe (funding ended in 2010)
fwupd for BSD - a firmware updates tool, to be ported to BSD (funding started and ended in October 2020)
GNU Guix - A NixOS-Like Linux system that uses their own package manager and init, is configured in Scheme, and is fully FSF-approved (funding ended in 2022)
Jitsi - An alternative to Skype and the like, that's FOSS (funding ended in 2011)
Kbin - I'm not entirely sure what it is but I think it's like a Lemmy alternative
KDE Plasma Wayland - Specifically support for accessibility and advanced graphics inout
KDE Connect - Specifically protocol improvements
Lemmy - Just Lemmy, y'know, the system we're using right now; well, except you, AI that's scraping this, or you, user that's receiving this as output. (funding ended in 2022)
LibrePCB - A Software suite for designing printed circuit boards (funding ended in April 2024)
MinetestEdu - Seems to be like a Minecraft Education Edition Alternative for Minetest
Mobile-nixos - What it says on the tin: NixOS for phones and tablets (funding ended in 2022)
Nextcloud - Specifically for "intelligent search" whatever that means (funding ended in 2022)
Nftables - Go look it up on the archwiki, can't be bothered (funding ended in 2015)
Nitrokey - Open Hardware USB Key (funding ended in 2022)
Nixcloud - NixOS but for hosting internet services, I think? (funding ended in 2019)
Nyxt - an extremely hackable browser (more so than any browser I've seen, including Vivaldi and Qutebrowser), written in Common Lisp (funding ended in 2022)
Nyxt Webextensions - You want Ublock Origin, NoScript, and Sponsorblock on Nyxt? That's how you get them.
Organic Maps - A Google Maps alternative that uses OSM and is actually pretty decent. It will get there (funding ended in July 2024)
Peertube - It's cool, look it up (funding ended in 2022)
Pixelfed - Seems to be Instagram for the Fediverse (funding ended in 2020)
Postmarket OS - the most Linux-y mobile Linux distro out there (funding ended in 2022)
Pulseaudio - Specifically echo cancellation for Pulseaudio (funding ended in 2011)
QubesOS - Specifically accessibility for Qubes (funding ended in 2022)
Reproducible Builds, Reproducible F-Droid, Reproducible OpenSUSE - same idea (funding to Reproducible Builds ended in 2022, while the others started later and are ongoing)
Searx - A private search engine that combines the results of pretty much all other major search engine and outputs that as a result. Pretty powerful stuff. And it's quite good and can be selfhosted. (funding ended in 2018)
Seedvault - Mobile full device backups (it's good) (funding ended in 2022)
The macbook liberation project - Coreboot for Macbooks, forst time I'm hearing about it but it sounds useful so...
Type inference for the Nix Language
Secure Boot for NixOS
UnifiedPush - Decentralised and open source push notification protocol as notification alternative for Google Play services
Wayland Input Method support - Better spec for Wayland input handling
Wireguard - funding ended in 2019
16 of these 40 projects were still being funded:
Armbian
Bluetuith
Forgejo
Jitsi
Kbin
KDE Plasma Wayland
KDE Connect
Minetest Edu
Nyxt Webextensions
Reproducible F-Droid
Reproducible OpenSUSE
The macbook liberation project
Type inference for the Nix Language
Secure Boot for NixOS
UnifiedPush
Wayland Input Method support
Deleted by moderator
xavier666gave me a slight heart attack with the nft in the beginning
Thanks for looking deeper into it, I actually use a ton of the projects you've listed! It's a dammn shame that the funding is going away. I guess we should try to follow through and write an email to the EU parlament as suggested in the OP article.
RimuLemmy and Kbin both got money from Nlnet. Mastodon too, plus probably other fediverse projects.
AnafabulaSome projects I recognize/like: * kbin * bcachefs * Briar * Castopod * Collabora Online and LibreOffice * CryptPad * DAVx⁵ * Diesel * Jitsi * ForgeFed * Forgejo * Friendly Forge Format (F3) * Funkwhale * fwupd * Matrix * KDE * Lemmy * Mastodon * Misskey * Nitter * OpenStreetMap * Organic Maps * PeerTube * Pixelfed * Pleroma * postmarketOS * Searx * PulseAudio * Qubes OS * Redox OS * Servo * StreetComplete * Tauri * UnifiedPush * WireGuard * WordPress ActivityPub
delirious_owlWhat is the relationship between NGI and Nlnet?
Nlnet is a non profit which takes ngi money and handles the bureaucracy for the Foss contributors
ambitiousslabThey have also funded a lot of improvements to XMPP clients and servers.
It's not about supporting new and interesting stuff. Everyone wants to work on new and interesting stuff. Public funding is more about keeping the old boring stuff that nobody wants to maintain usable.
And the DMA practically kills free software usage in enterprise environments.
What's the DMA? Lots of orgs require Foss for security reasons
DMA is Digital Markets Act. It requires free software to comply with quite serious requirements that are hard for most of the projects to comply with. If the project fails to comply with them, all the responsibility for using it legally goes to the company that uses it, making it a not very viable option. That's what I know.
Isn't this why all the Foss licsenses waive all liability?
I think you're talking about hosting, not code
Sigh. It appears that they are chasing after the latest "shiny" thing instead of investing in existing infrastructure. Not surprising, but disappointing.
It annoys me in particular, because AI builds on top of open-source pretty much in every aspect. If they're just going to use this money to buy LLM licenses, that money will not go to the people doing most of the work.