Manyfold The European Union must keep funding free software
17 July 2024Over the last six months, Manyfold has been the beneficiary of open source funding from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, via NLNet. The project was awarded €35000, which has let us change from a small part-time side project into a full-time effort with a burgeoning user and contributor community. We’ve also applied for another round to keep that success going.
NGI’s approach is unique in that it supports projects like ours, and much more important ones across the Internet. Open Source is essential to the modern world, but too often it’s unfunded; we see the results of that with things like the recent xz exploit which at its core was a social engineering attack on an overstretched part-time maintainer. NGI fills this hole with a funding stream with low barriers to entry, flexible terms, and lots of great additional support like accessibility and security audits, more things that are rare in part-time Open Source.
Unfortunately that funding stream appears to be absent from the 2025 Horizon Cluster 4 plan, instead being supplanted by a massive focus on the (mostly snake oil) topic of “AI”. This is shortsighted and simply playing into current hype cycles, which helps nobody.
Below is an open letter initially published in French by the petites singularités association, and translated into English by OW2, urging the Horizon programme to reconsider and maintain funding for NGI into the future; Manyfold is more than happy to be a signatory.
If you’d like to sign it yourself, please republish the letter below on your own web site (French, English or both), then add yourself in this table.
The European Union must keep funding free software
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission’s Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet’s calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and ecomomical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.
Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:
- “Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe” ;
- “A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life” ;
- “A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons” .
In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.
NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope - from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.
Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as “widening countries”¹, currently both a success and and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages to implement projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.
While the USA, China or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can’t afford this renunciation. Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration. This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central, and free software allows to address it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.