Investing in Open Source sustainability: OSI supports Open Forum Europe’s EU Sovereign Tech Fund proposal
As the European Union (EU) prepares its budget for the coming years, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has endorsed a proposal by Open Source think tank “Open Forum Europe” to create an EU Sovereign Tech Fund. The fund, modeled on the German Sovereign Tech fund, would support maintenance and development of key Open Source software projects.
Over the course of May, the Open Source Initiative featured the stories of maintainers of Open Source projects around the world. A common thread in many of their stories is the struggle to find time to work on their projects while working a full-time job, or get funding to work on their projects full-time. This underlines one of the core challenges Open Source communities face today: sustainability.
The OSI has been working to find solutions to sustainability challenges for some time. Through our outreach and education efforts, we set up exchanges between lawmakers and developers that have spurred changes in laws like the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act. In the long term, these changes will reduce burdens for Open Source developers and create an incentive for large users of Open Source software to fund its development. However, in the short-term, solutions are needed at a time when Open Source is more important than ever.
This year, as the EU prepares its upcoming budget, OSI joined Open Forum Europe in responding to the Public Consultation on the budget by calling for the creation of an EU Sovereign Tech fund, modeled on the German Sovereign Tech fund, which has already funded development, maintenance, and infrastructure for vital projects (like cURL, coreutils, Drupal, FFmpeg, Gnome, OpenStreetMap, OpenSSH, PHP, Wireguard, and many more). The new proposal would see the creation of a €53M fund taken from the EU budget to fund developers all over the world who work on projects recognised as being in the Public Interest.
It would also offer significant benefits to the EU, attracting more Open Source developers, increasing cybersecurity at a time where public authorities and businesses face heightened threats, and fostering the development of vital software the EU needs to assert its technological sovereignty at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. Additionally, the benefits of supporting Open Source would be felt in the wider economy, with a European Commission study showing Open Source produces €4 of economic benefit for every €1 invested.
Initial discussions on the EU’s upcoming budget will begin in the coming weeks, on the basis of the feedback to the public consultation, with negotiations scheduled to begin in Q4 2025. OSI will continue its education and outreach work, giving lawmakers the tools they need to understand Open Source, its benefits, and why addressing issues around the sustainability of Open Source is so important.