Codeberg and Forjeo have a foundation in Germany
> We are seeking project proposals between 5.000 and 50.000 euro's — which should get you on your way.
Am I the only one to think this is completely ridiculous amount of money?
So, you want me to leave my very well paid job to innovate for the sake of EU competitiveness but you don't to invest more than 50k EUR (max grant). And as an individual you don't even stand a chance so this 50k EUR has to be distributed across several people. Did I get this right?
Ah, and I almost forgot about the double standards ... the same EU commission is on a spending spree when it comes to the development of a fkn EU website which you use to apply for these funds. Each Brussels-based developer doing that very innovative work is paid ~100k EUR. What a blasphemy.
> The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors.
If you were trying to more widely insinuate that this third party dosing out small-to-modest incentives to individuals to do a bit of hacking on Fediverse stuff was the only thing the EU was doing to support Open Source or represented some sort of ceiling on the amounts EU-funded projects working on FOSS could pay their developers, it would be even more wrong.
Plenty of valid criticisms of the EU's cyber non-dependence strategy or the detail of grant and equity funding programmes for research and building stuff and how they weight FOSS (that's part of the reason for the consultation!) but you need to have the slightest idea what exists to get into those...
The only bigger denominator in terms of funds is Horizon which is completely political, and not worth mentioning at all, if that's what you wanted to suggest. It also operates under minuscule scale in terms of grants (up to 2.5M over 2 years) or funding (1-30M). No possibility for seed rounds which implies you already must be in the business and already have an almost viable product ready to deploy to the market tomorrow (EU bureaucracy calls it TRL6-8). This is all ridiculous and shows how detached from reality people making decisions there are. They even hire "experts" to weigh your application for which you know ... ta-da ... have to hire yet another "expert" to write that application for you. 100s of pages to prove your idea worthy. Once a year. World innovation runs at much much higher pace.
So, sure the R&D environment in EU is built on a very fertile ground and Brussels is doing their best to "call for an evidence" because open-source software is going to save the economy??? Right.
You can also be a participant alongside your well paid job, because once the memorandum of understanding is signed you have a year to work through the proposal at your own pace, during weekends or moonlighting.