[FjordWarden]

Money is a limited resource and I don't think NGI has proven to be a good investment. They made the same sort of embarrassing mistakes your average VC fund would make like BS blockchain ideas. A lot of uninspiring "research" where some of the deliverables is some open source software that no one ever uses and for which development stops after funding runs out. There seems to be something rotten about the open source "community" funded by the EU. I never going to forget the scene of NLnet members distributing free t-shirts with their logo on it to random attendees of the CCC congres in Berlin and then taking a big group photo for some social proof they can put on their website. All in the name of free and open source software that respects EU democratic values, that is pro-social narcissism for you right there.

[Qwertious]

>I never going to forget the scene of NLnet members distributing free t-shirts with their logo on it to random attendees of the CCC congres in Berlin and then taking a big group photo for some social proof they can put on their website.

You can pretend that grant money doesn't fund the writing of grant applications, but that won't make it true. If you make your criteria stricter and less reliable, then every project has to spend more overhead on crossing the Ts and dotting the Is to ensure their entire budget doesn't fall out from under them.

[poincaredisk]

As someone often on the receiving end of that money... It's complicated. My organization is doing a lot of great things and it's appreciated both nationally and internationally. Some of that work is funded from EU grants (including H2020 before).

But the problem with research is... it's hard to predict where it takes you. At some point you realize that the project you got funding for is a dead end, but you can do a really cool spinoff that becomes successful but is not technically the same project.

Another problem with research is that a lot of it is exploitation. You can't get a grant for just exploring random things and seeing what happens. But at the same time is a vital part of research - so official grants need to fund a lot of "underground" research, that may or may not mature into an official product. It's hard to estimate is a money is well spent by looking just at the official projects.

... And yes, many of projects are actually wasteful. Bureaucrats are really bad at estimating what counts as a valuable project and what is actually a sham moneygrab. In our case we are known for delivering so we often "win" when we start, but often random shell companies with the hype of the week come dangerously close.