Maybe it’s just an oversight, but the European Commission’s draft of projects for next year fails to mention the NGI Zero Commons Fund, an important source of funding for FOSS projects.
In something of an editorial on its website, the postmarketOS community has announced concern that the European Commission has failed to mention Next Generation Internet programs in its draft of the projects it’s going to fund in 2025. NGI is an EC initiative that has an ambitious mandate to build a trustworthy internet. One of the methods it uses for doing this is funding over a thousand FOSS projects through its NGI Zero Commons Fund.
PostmarketOS, which develops an eponymous Alpine Linux-based distribution for mobile devices, finds it disturbing that the Commission might be dropping NGI. That’s understandable, because even though NGI funds open-source projects accross-the-board, some of those funds have been going specifically into Linux mobile development to fund projects that includes postmarketOS (“multiple times,” the project said), cell broadcast support for the Linux Mobile Stack, Maemo Leste, Mobile NixOS, Mepo, Replicant on Pinephone 1.2, and others.
“In other words, NGI has made a dramatic impact to improve our sustainable, privacy and attention respecting Linux Mobile ecosystem,” the postmarketOS project said in its post. “One of the very few answers we have to the duopoly of Android and iOS from Silicon Valley.”
In fact, just before the postmarketOS folks posted their concerns about NGI projects apparent loss of support, it learned that an application Postmarket had filed to receive some new funding had been accepted.
“It will allow us to spend significant additional hours on improving support for PipeWire, iwd, systemd, a proof of concept for immutable rootfs, and the next two postmarketOS releases,” they wrote. “All with the overall goal of making postmarketOS more reliable and usable for non-technical users. We are very grateful and eager to get started!”
The project would, of course, also like to continue to have NGI available as a funding source in the future — as would plenty of other important open-source projects I’m guessing — which won’t happen if the European Commission drops support for the NGI and the NGI Zero Commons Fund.
Gotta Blog or a Website? You Can Help
If you publish a website — even if it’s just a small blog that you think nobody reads — you can help.
It seems that an open letter initially published in French by the Petites Singularités association is circulating, and folks with websites are being asked to publish the letter (in your own preferred language, of course). After you’ve published it, you’re asked to co-sign it by adding yourself to this table on Petites Singularités website. We’re doing it… and if you’re a FOSS advocate, so should YOU! (Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout.)
The European Union Must Keep Funding Free Software
Open Letter to the European Commission
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 supporting 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 economical 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 million 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 ecosystem 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 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 implementing 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 addressing it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.
As defined by Horizon Europe, widening Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lituania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Widening associated countries (under condition of an association agreement) include Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Feroe Islands, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldavia, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkeye, and Ukraine. Widening overseas regions are Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique, Reunion Island, Mayotte, Saint-Martin, The Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands. ↩
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
