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realusername·

How much money did the EU finance towards alternatives last year then?

I hear them complaining but for now, the alternatives are mostly run by hobbyists.

We're starting from so low that even a few dozen millions would help a lot.

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The EU's NGI Zero in cooperation with NLNet has been funding quite a bit of postmarketOS

https://nlnet.nl/project/postmarketOS/

https://nlnet.nl/project/MobileSettings

https://nlnet.nl/project/pmOS-23-24

https://nlnet.nl/project/postmarketOS-daemons

https://nlnet.nl/project/pmOS-25-26

I think if NGI Zero had been around when Meego was killed, we might be in a better situation now.

I also get the feeling, that the fact that there is so little reported and discussed about this funding reflects the actual level of interest in alternatives.

I’d love for some of my tax money in the EU to go towards both supporting FOSS development and various home grown software, instead of seeing proprietary DBs and OSes being used wherever I look. Like come on you can’t afford enough devs to make some govt. service well and yet you’re gonna back it by Oracle and Windows Server for the apps, really?

> €2 billion over seven years to fund alternatives to proprietary software

I'll believe it when I'll see it, for now I haven't seen any of the Android forks (LineageOS, EOS, GrapheneOS...) or Linux OS (Phosh, Plasma mobile, Ubports, ...) get any funds from the EU.

You will see it when you look.

For context, as yearly spending of 285 million €, that compares to building roughly 20 km of motorway, or 0.5% of EU's agriculture subsidies, or half what the German federal government pays Microsoft per year.

Edit: 2000m/7 is 285m, not 466m.

> if they just spent a little, maybe as much as a couple of million it would make a huge difference, but they refuse to ...

they do.

> 250 million isn't much ...

sigh.

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