Re: Sovereign Tech Fund Applications Open

Thanks for the feedback. The USA had such a programm.
Then a crazy fool became their president and completely freezed it.

I had talked about the US OpenTechFund with Karen Kornbluh.

She was the Former US Ambassador to OECD during the Obama adminstration and responsible for the Fund once.
She promised to reopen it, I proposed to make it an alliance with sovereigntech … Seems it didn't happen.

Please note that applications are open to anyone. 
It is also possible to include different milestones or work in one application.

In the beginning my gov. asked wikimedia foundation and me for ActivityPub how much it needs 
to secure critical infrastructure. So given the initial promises of “60 Mio.” I am not fully convinved yet :)
Please note that last round was just a closed start for Open Wounds which bleeded heavily.
It was a so called “Nachtragshaushalt” [a budget which is small cause it was negotiated too late] …

About “not looking”, I can't go in details just be assured that their interest in ActivityPub is high!

Sebastian




March 23, 2023 at 4:01 PM, "Bob Wyman" <bob@wyman.us> wrote:


> 
> It is great to see that the German government has taken the lead in supporting our critical open source infrastructure. But, I continue to be disappointed that the US government doesn't appear to have a similar program. Some time ago, I contributed to an unsuccessful Schmidt Futures proposal https://www.plaintextgroup.com/reports/securing-open-source-software-at-the-source  to modify the NDAA to include such a process. I remain hopeful that the US will, in time, recognize that our open source infrastructure is just as important as our road, port, and utility infrastructure. My guess is that supporting Open Source Infrastructure produces a benefit-cost ratio (benefit/cost) exceeding that of virtually any other government investment. (Note: The English version of the Sovereign Tech Fund announcement is here: https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/applications/ )
> 
> I'm intrigued by the **minimum funding level of €150,000** and that they have a budget of €10 million/year. I'm assuming that the minimum is set at something like a single-year's salary for an experienced developer.
> 
> They say they are "**not** looking for user-facing applications, such as messaging apps or file storage services," which makes sense. They are properly focused on infrastructure, not applications that use that infrastructure. The projects they started funding last October give some sense of their scope and focus. Those were: Bundler/RubyGems, curl, Fortran Package Manager, OpenBGPd, OpenMLS, OpenPGP.js/GopenPGP, OpenSSH, Sequoia PGP, and WireGuard. Their feasibility study provides additional insight into their motivations and process. (https://sovereigntechfund.de/files/SovereignTechFund_Machbarkeitsstudie_en.pdf)
> 
> bob wyman
>