[greatgib]

Always the same broken pattern of the EU: throwing shitload of money to the big actors of a field without really a coherent strategy or a real control of how the funds are used.

Like that, a few companies are specialized in sucking public funds and delivering nothing. Or just the minimum to say that they did something.

Again here, no money will be directed to the thousands of core and essential OSS projects that are maintained by individuals without a corporate backing. Or to the individual contributors that are the key to these stacks.

Instead, the only one that will be able to get money, legally per EU policy, will be consortium of suckers and eventually nice but useless researchers in University...

[olejorgenb]

One counter example: https://nextgraph.org/elfa-consortium-encrypted-local-first-... (eg.. https://www.ironcalc.com/)

[greatgib]

Is it really a counter example?

"Gathering 12 partners for at least 3 years, towards a suite composed of 16 apps!"

Read the About page and tell me what is it exactly that you will be paying for? https://nextgraph.org/introduction/

I mean we all agree of how good are the values posted on these page, but what are we paying for? Oh I see: https://nextgraph.org/roadmap/

   This is the new roadmap for 2025, established thanks to the new grant received from NLnet Foundation and the NGI Zero Commons Fund.
   The main goal is to finish the Core protocol, improve the Wallet and App, and bring about the Framework/SDK so that developers can create standalone or embedded apps based on NextGraph. Those apps can make capability-based access requests on the user's data, define smart-contracts and implement any business logic within cross-document transactions. 

No LOL, this is where your money is going... At the same time, the maintainers of the openssl, sqllite, openssh, ... or for example NGINX that now belongs to big american company...

[olejorgenb]

> throwing shitload of money to the big actors of a field

My reply was directed at this part. Based on my memory seeing ironcalc specifically getting funding. Unless they hide it well they are not a big actor. And the project looks interesting and worthy to me. (I see I should have omitted the nextgraph link as I'm not familiar at all with that project)

Few of the projects listed here seems to be big actors: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

Some projects funded by NLnet: Organic Maps, KDE Connect, KDE Plasma Wayland, Bottles (Builds on Wine IIRC), Briar, mitmproxy, Nextcloud, Wireguard

Note: NLnet is an independent organization, but it seems to get quite some support from EU. Maybe you would argue NLnet itself is a big actor?

I think funding already established, respected donor organizations is a decent strategy.

[DocTomoe]

The pattern is not broken, it works as designed. This is mostly a money-pump from government(s) to private interests, mostly sitting in large IT houses.

[beernet]

> Like that, a few companies are specialized in sucking public funds and delivering nothing. Or just the minimum to say that they did something.

Agreed. Fraunhofer institute in Germany is a prime example.

[greatgib]

In all cases, it is not 100% of the money that is wasted uselessly. There is still a few percents that are directly to useful use. Like there some companies or big companies that contribute in some cases in significant open source projects that are used by everyone. But that is more the exception than the norm.

[vrganj]

You mean the guys that invented MP3s and were major contributors to h264?

[beernet]

Yes, I mean exactly these guys, who did effectively nothing since these "glory" days (which are not really so glory if you Look at the entire story).

This insitution could not exist a minute without tax payer money and provides very, very little in return. Mediocre (at best) employees with the work ethic of public officials, and we know what this means when talking Germany...

[Galanwe]

> Like that, a few companies are specialized in sucking public funds and delivering nothing.

Not just public, private funds as well. Typical EU, I call that helicopter regulating: you see a problem, throw a regulation at it, then close you eyes.

GDPR pop-ups are the most obvious example, but there are so many more.

For instance, now apparently companies can opt to send payslips digitally instead of physically (paper). Of course, some smart ass nitpicked that employees could loose or change their mail address, so the company is now forced to store digitally delivered payslips in some kind of European-hosted vault for 10 years. And since no sane company want to be liable for that, we now have a wonderful ecosystem of trash "payslip digital vaults" startups, which companies use to proxy-send employee payslips.

So in essence, my company is now sending my payslips (with name, address, contact details, compensation breakdown, etc) to a stupid start-up with egregious ToS, just because "send it by mail and let the employee back it up" was too simple. Thanks !!!