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Great to see open source projects funded, but the value of Flatpak for tech sovereignty evades me somewhat. It's a pretty niche and questionable piece of technology, and likely won't be there in 10 years. Some grants by STF, like Mastodon, Openstreetmaps, Let's Encrypt, rustls are spot on, but there are many questionable ones.

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Flatpak is proving to be a very important piece of underlying infrastructure if government agencies want to switch to Linux computers running distributed graphical applications for their workers.

Yes, it has major problems, and you might be right it won't exist in 10 years, but the point of this grant is to fund their attempt at fixing their problems and getting it to a point where it's better infrastructure that can survive into the future.

Flatpak itself might not survive, but the underlying protocols (portals, security contexts in wayland, pipewire, and d-bus, systemd-appd, …) are relevant for sandboxing on linux as a whole. While I do not personally with every design decision, I still think this is useful and valuable work.

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