[news] EU funds SiMPL open source components including Solid

Hi all,

Just wanted to share the great news here with you too
https://www.soprasteria.be/docs/librariesprovider2/sopra-steria-benelux-documents/infratex-consortium---simpl_v91f1e33b1-9bdd-4736-be2e-c242e75f5a87.pdf?sfvrsn=3ca97fdb_1

Basically, with their SiMPL program, the EU is spending 150 million euros
on open source software development for data spaces over the coming years.
Just to emphasize that this is a lot of money, if you translate that to the
average engineer salary in Europe, that's about *3* *millennia worth *of
EU-funded working days. :)

A lot of the resulting components will have other roles (certificate-based
service discovery registries, bringing computation to the data, access
control vocabularies, etc etc etc) but they will all be open source, and
all related to bringing cross-cutting interoperability, reusable server
components and connections across what the EU calls "data spaces".

I'm not an expert in the dynamics of the tendering, but as I understand it,
two framework agreements have now been awarded, one of them being the
InfrateX consortium whose press release I just linked to (please add any
press release from the other awarded consortium if you have it; I haven't
seen it yet). As you can see, the Ponder Source Foundation (my employer),
is one of the consortium partners which I of course think is super cool,
and we're equally excited that SolidLab/imec is there too!

Both My Data and Solid are quoted in the bottom row of logos as "data space
support organizations" for which our consortium will be building open
source software over the coming years, and I'm hoping the other consortium
will contribute to Solid too.

Please send me a direct email if you have any more info or questions about
the role of Solid in SiMPL, or if you are attending the Gaia-X Summit in
Alicante tomorrow/Friday. I'll be there, representing my employer but
handing out some "Solid Project" laptop stickers to spread the gospel of
course. :)


Cheers,
Michiel de Jong
Director
Ponder Source Foundation