Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund: Strengthening Digital Infrastructure+Open Source
sovereigntechfund.de
sovereigntechfund.de
However, I see a distinct lack of “geeks” in this initiative. Instead a lot of pol-sci majors that want to “manage” / claim developments they themselves would not have the skills to build.
I feel the same. Germany has a strong undercurrent of great open source developers and I hope the bureaucracy won’t come in the way of helping the geeks/hackers.
Very few geeks have the skills (or even the desire) to build a financially sustainable open source project. The projects that are financially sustainable, are often tied to corporate ownership, often one of the FAANG. Still, the work to build the financial and community framework for such a project is often valued at close to, or even less than zero - as your comment shows. There's a lot of talk in the open source world about funding, or rather the lack thereof. Still, comments such as yours downtalk every effort people invest as profiteering of open source work. Wonder why no one wants to do that work - it's thankless, hard, undervalued and underappreciated, even by the ones that would profit of it - the people doing the coding. Your comment is doing all efforts to provide funding for open source projects a disservice.
But it should be done by persons that also have insight in the technical work. Otherwise problems of judgment cannot be avoided.
That’s the same in every profession by the way. You want to be head of the carpenters guild? Work as a carpenter for some time. Even if it is just carpentry as a hobby. You don’t like it as a hobby? Well, that says a lot already.
There is ample organization and leadership skill among the geeks. Look at the site you are on and its background. Many millionaire geeks...
Are any of those building and maintaining a successful open source project that is not commercially interesting to their company?
Paul Graham
Rasmus Lerdorf
The world is full of ‘em.
You don’t need one of those as the maintainer. They can also just hire somebody to do it for them.
But you do need some number of successful geeks in advisory roles to keep the political class on target when the funding is allocated.
And who are they going to hire? Someone with people skills and accounting skills. That doesn’t need to be a tech person.
“People skills” mostly are detecting the group consensus and running with it. Not the type of leader you need in tech.
Geeks are known to fight hard for their independent opinions. Especially when it goes against the group opinion. You need the willingness to do so - if required - from a leader ... so not a pure people person.
What is required though is being a good communicator. Most geeks learn that very fast. If properly taught...
Accounting can be hired for pretty cheap virtually everywhere on earth.
In many cases these bureaucrats destroy working projects for their own benefit (fame, power, salaries they would not get otherwise).
That isn't meant to say that funding is bad in all cases, but reflexively cheering whenever a new fund is announced is naive.
A lack of money also means that the pool of people working on public good (open source) projects self-selects to those that have the money to do that - and that’s limiting the pool and input into those projects.
Not everything is business and there should be support for new infrastructure that falls outside the purview of businesses. I’m glad there’s some initiative from my Govt to address digital infrastructure woes. It’ll be interesting to see how it’ll pan out. However The most important thing is a periodic audit to avoid a Luca App like situation.
Many government initiatives in Germany support friends and family and have poor results or none. Below someone is mentioning ARPA. I can assure you that nothing remotely like ARPA will come out of this. Different country, different times.
Before any money is handed out, first I'd like to know who appointed the organizers and for what reason.
The language used and the fact that the same persons are involved in two government funded funds strongly suggests that this is a diversity initiative in disguise.
The more I see of open source foundations and funds, the more I think that in many cases the prime beneficiaries are the organizers (though I don't have proof in this case and will not claim it).
> strongly suggests that this is a diversity initiative in disguise
It would be great if we can use this logic backwards.
For any team or initiative we see that is all male, we treat it like a discrimination initiative in disguise.
If you don't treat every situation of the above of all male teams/projects/funds like that, I am not sure why you do so in this case.
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Edit: Update formatting
If this were in the field of nursing which is dominated by women, I would be very surprised to see a group of (exclusively) men leading some advocacy/project.
Then they divide that money in categories, and it turns out IT industrial policy got allocated that much money, which they divide into projects.
In this project, they build a comittee, which decides the best is to subsidise cool sounding initiatives by well connected, politically correct groups.
Top to bottom government spending that goes wasted in politically connected groups that give nothing back to society.
This initiative is form the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, a foundation that’s like a decade old. One of their projects is the prototype fund. Is it really surprising that the people involved in one initiative of the OKFN are involved in another of their initiatives, especially since it revolves broadly around the same topic - funding public interest software? Are you seriously suggesting that the OKFN is a front to distribute government money to a thinly veiled diversity initiative? Because the language used in your comment strongly suggest so. But I don’t have proof in this case, so I will not claim that this is what you’re doing.
What market failure (apparently unique to Germany) are they fixing?
Edit:
I have like 4 different responses. 1) Open source is a human right, 2) security is a mess, 3) China has proven an invasive industrial policy can be successful, and 4) Government intervention is important to prevent wealth imbalances
So my conclusion given the lack of consensus is that this fund is totally pointless.
The whole idea of infinite returns in the limit due to steady return from a one time investment is just a different spin on a perpetuum mobile. Entropy incurs a regular cost, be it supply chains, tools, workers, or software.
I'm curious if you have change your mind about it or still prefer JS for new projects?
One thing that I find attractive about Clojure is Datomic (databases being a source of complexity in applications), its features like immutability(the db as a value, history), data structures as query language not strings, transactions and data model, OTOH, it's a scary niche black box. Also, the clojure REPL is a nice addition.
I'm no stranger to lisps, having played with scheme and racket, know macros, watched some Hickey videos and overall understand clojure's philosophy and concepts but haven't never use it for a real world business application. I'm sure nodejs/postgres could suit my needs perfectly but the ergonomics/defaults of clojure/datomic makes me think things would be less tedious to develop.
The point is that open-source software is not and should not be regulated by the market, as it should not be profit driven.
Compare for example with academia - universities in Europe are overwhelmingly government funded, yet they get a lot of freedom in what research they conduct.
(1) the government can't just go throw money at people without rules. (2) they at least have a published 50 page study (3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683265
If the money funds technology that is still great!
But be very careful when a subculture becomes a platform for organizers who never did the actual work. Be it art or code or whatever.
The majority of people might have the best intentions. The fear though is that we have here a nice breeding ground for sociopathic behavior in the open source space (for a narrow definition of sociopathic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).
Oh yeah. Acquiring government funding and the reporting for it is a big part of my day job. Coding still happens ... after midnight.
The funny thing is, I might even up as a beneficiary of this. And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus.
> The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.”
Looking at the teams-page of the OKF, that's a funny bunch. 90% did not work on open source prior to taking this gig (with just one or two shining counterexamples). And now they are doing it "for the love of it"?
It is okay to do open source as a normal dayjob. And teaching kids to code is important as well. I guess what pisses me off is the political class taking on roles of "thought leadership" in the "secret garden of the geeks" where entrance was once earned by hard, cold lines of code free of bugs.
You acknowledge that there's a lot of work involved in handling funding for an opens source project. And yet you seem to consider the that 50% of the work worthless, despite them enabling the 50% of the technical work. All my open source work is worthless in your eyes. I'll spend my christmas days fixing a mid five digit tax mistake that the technical people made on an open source project - because that work is boring and tech work is more important - and I get to ensure that the money doesn't go to the tax authorities. But my name doesn't appear in the commit log, so I'm not a contributor. I'm not even on the github org, nor visible in another place. In your eyes, that's worthless. In your eyes, I can't do it for the love of open source since I have no substantial code contributions in the past - and that's why no one takes those 50% off your hands, so you can focus 100% on the tech stuff.
And without knowing specifics on what you do, if it is helping open source then I am grateful. In no way did I want to denigrate your work. And I understand where some frustration might come from if the effort is not properly acknowledged. Yet, there is nobility in knowing to have helped society in a quiet way.
Do you know the golden rule? "The person with the gold makes the rules."
Things only become problematic when the organizational roles start to draw power from the golden rule and build a little political fiefdom to uphold their power according to their values and skills, say, lawyering. And given the different voices in this HN thread, I'm not the only one to have noticed such effects in some previously technical communities.
[sarcasm mode]
Let's see what happens once you become the person distributing the gold. Then it shouldn't be hard to extract some respect out of the grubby dirty hands of the code contributors.
[/sarcasm mode]
Second reason may be strong lobbying from legacy IT concerns. They usually get government contracts and are usually viable for support from such funds.
Another thing that was demonstrated at exactly same time was that it is possible to have decade long stagnation in an open market. I'm talking about the state of the Web and mobile has come to in the hands of FB, Google and others in the free market with no government interventions.
The biggest sensation since many years is (China government supported) TikTok and the "free market" response to it was to try to ban it or force purchase it.
My hope is, that countries like USA and UK will re-think their understanding of fairness in a free market and once again we will have fair and innovative free business environment but at this time and stage there's evidence that governmental intervention can yield innovation in stagnated markets.
In this exact case, people at the German government are targeting a specific risk of foundational elements in tech being underfunded or overprotected.