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'Industry, national governments, and the EU' must pay for maintainers. El Reg says charity shouldn't start at home
GitHub, owned by money-bags Microsoft, has called upon the European Union to create a publicly funded "Sovereign Tech Fund" (EU-STF) to boost the open source software ecosystem.
"Open source software is open digital infrastructure that our economies and societies rely on. Nevertheless, open source maintenance continues to be underfunded, especially when compared to physical infrastructure like roads or bridges. So we ask: how can the public sector better support open source maintenance," GitHub's director of developer policy Felix Reda said, without a shred of irony.
The Register would like to point out that a good starting point might involve Microsoft putting its hand in its own pocket to start the fund raising. The proprietary software giant reported $72.3 billion (around ￡65 billion) in net income over its last financial year (fiscal 2024) yet which would appear eager to spend other people's money wherever possible
Reda added:
"There is a profound mismatch between the importance of open source maintenance and the public attention it receives. The demand-side value of open source software to the global economy is estimated at $8.8 trillion, and the European Commission's own research shows that OSS contributes a minimum of €65-95 billion ($76.5-111.8 billion) to the EU economy annually. The flip side of everybody benefiting from this open digital infrastructure is that too few feel responsible for paying the tab."
GitHub's call for the scales to be balanced is based on a study, carried out by the Open Forum Europe, Fraunhofer ISI, and the European University Institute, into an existing sovereign tech fund: Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, which opened funding in 2022.
"In the Sovereign Tech Fund, we have developed a new instrument with which we can effectively invest in Europe's digital sovereignty using secure, sustainable, and resilient open source enabling technologies," Franziska Brantner, parliamentary state secretary for economic affairs and climate action, said at the time. "The fund was developed in co-creation with the open source community and can respond flexibly to the needs of the users. It is to be consolidated and scaled up in the coming years."
GitHub's suggestion, though, is for a bigger scale-up than Brantner and colleagues had perhaps planned – taking the core concept of the fund and making it Europe-wide. Where the Sovereign Tech Agency started with a modest €1 million ($1.18 million) and grew to a little over €23 million ($27 million), GitHub's call is for "no less than €350 million" ($412 million) as a "minimum contribution from the upcoming EU multiannual budget" – a pull on ever-tightening public coffers which accounts for less than half a percent of GitHub parent Microsoft's annual profit for the last financial year.
The fund, the study says, should pull funding from "industry, national governments, and the EU," without volunteering GitHub or Microsoft as part of said industry, and provide a single place for open source maintainers to apply for funds - borrowing from the design of GitHub's own Secure Open Source Fund, a relatively narrowly focused grant programme which provides $10,000 to maintainers of selected open source software projects.
The bureaucracy should be kept to a minimum, the report recommends, and the fund should be politically independent with a community focus.
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It's a call to action which will likely resonate with the signatories to an open letter sent to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen back in March calling for the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund "to support public investments," with "significant additional commitment of funds" – but which did not specifically call for said funds to be directed towards open source software and hardware projects.
"Current digital infrastructure is to a large degree built on layers and layers of open source," notes Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of the cURL project and president of the European Open Source Academy, in support of the study, "and yet a substantial part of this open source is built and maintained by enthusiasts or other financially- and resource-constrained teams. Funding options like the EU-STF proposal can truly help enforce the ecosystem and offer new paths towards sustainability."
The study is available to download now on the OpenForum Europe website; questions put to the European Commission had not been answered at the time of publication.
Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, told us her organization has worked with the UK public sector for some time on a blueprint for open source.
"We love that the EU is working on a fund and that is definitely a critical part of the landscape, but our approach is a little more holistic. As the world's first country to have an open source first policy in its public sector, we have a head start on understanding what is needed and funding is indeed absolutely critical.
"But for that money to be put to good use it needs much more and that more is a landscape review which ensures that the practical steps are taken across the infrastructure to embed the necessary processes, whether in the scoping of the proposals for funding, training the examiners, or ensuring that the companies funded don't simply dump code on GitHub without planning its longevity and building the necessary communities."
Recommendations OpenUK made earlier this year include "similar proposals" to the Sovereign tech fund, but also consider how funding can be allocated, innovation management and ways the "national infrastructure can be underpinned in the open source world."
"We are currently unable to share full details as we continue to workshop the recommendations with our public sector, but hope that a fuller picture will emerge this autumn." ?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
