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Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

(nlnet.nl)
473 points edent | 1 comments | 23 Apr 25 07:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.337s | source
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mixcocam ◴[23 Apr 25 09:15 UTC] No.43770093[source]▶
There is also a lot of indirect funding in the form of the governments purchasing habits: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-s...

In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.

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rafaelmn ◴[23 Apr 25 09:24 UTC] No.43770140[source]▶
I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.

Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.

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1. mixcocam ◴[23 Apr 25 10:00 UTC] No.43770329[source]▶
> I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

I agree that systems are far from perfect at the time. I also think that governments have been putting money into digital tech for much less time than private enterprise.

Regarding the money that gets to the developers, I added a comment on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770310