FOSS Funding Vanishes From EU's 2025 Horizon Program Plans
hubie writes:
Funding for free and open source software (FOSS) initiatives under the EU's Horizon program has mostly vanished from next year's proposal, claim advocates who are worried for the future of many ongoing projects.
Pierre-Yves Gibello, CEO of open-source consortium OW2, urged EU officials to re-evaluate the elimination of funding for the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative from its draft of 2025 Horizon funding programs in a recently published open letter. Gibello said the EU's focus on enterprise-level FOSS is essential as the US, China and Russia mobilize "huge public and private resources" toward capturing the personal data of consumers, which the EU's regulatory regime has decided isn't going to fly in its territory.
FOSS software, Gibello argued, is key to protecting European interests from the data-guzzling economy that's grown up elsewhere, which is why he's perplexed at the decision not to fund NGI.
"We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiative," Gibello said.
"Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations," he added.
The NGI initiative has taken to its own defense as well, releasing an impact report on the program last week which aligns with Gibello's claims.
[...] The funding that Gibello is concerned about losing comes from the EU's massive Horizon program that kicked off in 2020 to fund technological and scientific research in the bloc, of which NGI is just a small portion.
Horizon funding has been doled out multiple times since the program began. NGI has received tens of millions of euros over the past few years under Cluster 4 of the program, which doles out cash for digital, industry and space projects.
Gibello told us that NGI is mentioned in two sections of the 2025 Horizon Europe Maine Work Programme, which is still being hammered out and isn't publicly available: Driving the evolution of the internet toward "open and interoperable Web 4.0 and virtual worlds," and support for the Virtual Worlds Partnership and Web 4.0 initiative.
"The new proposal says nothing about community building, commons, and civil rights. And has no ambition with regards to the overall internet infrastructure," Gibello said in an emailed statement. "It is just 'Horizon as usual,' with always the same large academics and companies obtaining grants - then pouring a few nuts to feed the ecosystem monkeys."
Those monkeys being "the ones who provide them their infrastructure software and collaboration tools," Gibello added.
[...] "Our French [Horizon national contact point] was told - as an unofficial answer - that because lots of budget are allocated to AI, there is not much left for Internet infrastructure," Gibello said.
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