The German government wants to stabilise and rename the Sovereign Tech Fund for the promotion of open source. In future, a state-owned company under the name ‘Sovereign Tech Agency’ will promote the development of basic open source technologies. The new agency is to be linked to the federal government’s leapfrog innovation agency SPRIND as a limited company The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK) has funded 60 technology projects to date through the Sovereign Tech Fund, which was established in 2022. For example, open source is to be strengthened by funding vulnerability research. Maintainers of critical components can also be supported as fellows. In addition, the Sovereign Tech Fund organises competitions to structurally improve the quality of relevant open source developments. ‘Open source components form an important basis of the global digital infrastructure,’ says Franziska Brantner (Green Party), Parliamentary State Secretary at the BMWK. ‘However, up-to-dateness and security depend far too often on dedicated developers maintaining the components in their free time, usually without remuneration.’ Professionalisation via the STF shows that this can be done differently.
More funding for 2025
According to its own information, the Sovereign Tech Fund has so far received 500 applications for funding totalling 114 million euros. To date, 23.5 million euros in funding has been made available, which is now set to increase to 29 million euros in the upcoming federal budget. ‘The agency will continue to focus on digital infrastructure, open technologies in the public interest and common digital resources,’ reads a statement on the Sovereign Tech Agency’s website.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
State owned means the state wants to control open source, can’t see how this can possibly be a good thing, you know it will mean funding with conditions.
Well, the things they are funding will get funded? How is that a bad thing?!
The conditions range from very broad, like “fix bugs” (curl), over somewhat specific like “improve cross-platform compatibility and the Linux RNG” (Wireguard), to very specific like “create a test-suite and drive development on the Fediverse account migration functionality” (ActivityPub).
You can see more for yourself at https://www.sovereign.tech/tech
All of these seem to be rather tame conditions that are just there to ensure the funds get used in the way they were intended to be used. And I don’t really see how that gives the STF any sort of direct control over these projects, while it gives those projects resources to achieve more than they might have otherwise. There are no long-term funding models that would enable implicit control over these projects.