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Comment by mffap | Hacker News Reader

Is Germany funding the oss projects as well? Traditionally they have this mindset of free open source software, with a strong emphasis on free, while not factoring in the cost of maintaining a project. When the usage gets higher there should be a plan for sustainable progress and maintenance.

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Yes. Germany's "Sovereign Tech Fund" to support open source tech has made 11.5million Euros available for 2023: https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/faq

Thanks for sharing, interesting. But the named components in the article seem not to have received funding.

https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/110340953550548309

"Yes, we fund Matrix dev by selling encrypted messaging to governments, which includes police: if you don’t like that then please feel free to use a different app."

So?

I must admit I first read this as "we sell encrypted messages to governments" and spit my coffee from the surprise.

yup, this was not my finest wording :(

Germany's funding of Gnome was discussed here on HN just last week event:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38228649

There is also https://opencode.de/en/ueber-open-code but I think this is less about funding

EDIT: okay sorry, this was already mentionend in TFA

Wow, so much! The corona app was €214m. Telekom and SAP were were happy to take that!

That’s a widely repeated though at best highly misleading number. It includes all of the backup telephone bank system (for getting the TANs for the actual release [0]), the link to the public health system (for reporting) and the money to upgrade the lab systems so that these can enter the test results in the system. Unfortunately I never saw a splitted-out version of the budget, but from the list above I’d be surprised if even 10% went to the actual app(s) itself.

[0] which, completely shockingly I know, massively reduced the number is released contact traces

„Demnach erhielten die Entwickler und Betreiber der App, die Firmen SAP und Deutsche Telekom, im Jahr 2020 52,8 Millionen Euro. Im Folgejahr stiegen die Ausgaben auf 78,8 Millionen Euro. 2022 sanken die Kosten auf 68,6 Millionen.”

What’s misleading, exactly?

The "Betreiber" part includes the phone banks, which, being operated 24/7/365 and scaled for 80m inhabitants, will run a tab pretty quickly (in particular since I never heard anyone having trouble getting a person on the phone). And the "Entwickler" part includes software upgrades on the lab systems, which (IIRC and I'm far too lazy to actually go and check) were a couple of thousand. Effectively they upgraded all the lab systems in Germany with that money.

None of that is covered when I'm thinking about "developed an app for XX EUR". The money isn't the misleading part, it's the insinuation for what it was spend that's misleading. If you can dig up a itemised bill I'd be very interested, but I don't think anyone will get that in the next 10 years without a huge effort involving actual courts...

Yes, at least there are several public libraries running on Linux distributions.

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