Introducing The Fellowship for Maintainers – Sovereign Tech Fund | Hacker News Reader

Introducing The Fellowship for Maintainers – Sovereign Tech Fund

sovereigntechfund.de

42 pointskelset8 comments

If you always wanted to maintain OSS for free and get to write grant applications...

Seriously, you have a dozen or so folks on staff, and you just can't decide which OSS programs are most worthy of funding without making the maintainers jump through hoops?

I know, it's a German government initiative, it has to happen that way, but Jeebus. My home country continues to fail at tech.

I had a €25k grant from NLnet a few years back, and the process was painless and hassle-free, no more than the average job application: "here is my project, and here is why I think it might be a good fit, and here's what I plan to work on". And that was it.

Meanwhile, Google did a security review of my ~4,500 Go library a few years back, and that process was significantly more effort. The entire thing was incredibly bureaucracy-heavy, time-consuming (two hour-long meetings that didn't tell me anything), and generally beyond ridiculous.

Anyway, I don't know about this initiative as I never even heard from them before today, but "get grant" does not automatically means "jump through hoops" or other hassle.

And in the end, you do need to send money to people actually wanting to receive it and can do something useful with it. You can't "just" send money to random projects.

A professional grantwriter can do this for a miniscule fraction of what you're likely to receive in grants. If they're decent, they'll do some analysis beforehand on whether writing the grant is wort your money.

It's not like Germany is unique in this respect: grants in the US are the same way. And venture capital--the "market efficient" solution--is far more onerous to obtain.

All of this is true, but as a grant-giver (and historically a recipient) in this space, we really could streamline this part of the process. Getting funds through grant-applications is a solution to a whole set of problems (including corruption, lack of transparency, donor research etc), which we may be able to solve in different ways in an open source space.

Really the misconception is about VC fundraising. It is much more onerous than grant writing, when looking at people who actually raise lots of money!

If you want to maintain OSS for free you can already do so with no need to write a grant application.

the STF is probably the best way for europe to push tech forward, without resorting to regulation.

then of course if they can use the money collected from dma offenders and have that fund open source stuff.

that way europe doesn't get squeezed on both sides by usa and china.

EU fines go into the general EU budget, not earmarked for any department.

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