From my experience with these projects and people running them, most are just grift designed to extract money from EU programs.

Don't know why you're being downvoted for stating the truth.

In Brussels (and all over EU), many companies are founded just to leach off EU funds or to advise you how to do it, for a fee of course. They're basically red-tape companies, and it's big business in Brussels.

Look around on LinkedIn and you'll see a bunch of serial entrepreneurs with fancy titles and pompous resumes, who found a new company every couple of years, each tailored to a new innovative way of sucking that EU grant money and producing zero real world results, other than a fancy looking website about the vision of the company, and writing lots documentation.

And, honestly, I don't blame them, I blame the EU politicians for being monstrous idiots.

That may be true about the ERC, but the NGI Zero scheme works very differently. Take a look at the grantees and you'll see.

Disclaimer: I'm working full time at Nextcloud on pure open source software and on my free time, I (co-)maintain many KDE apps, one of them currently sponsored by Nlnet.

Nlnet is a very nice initiative but let's be realistic the funding provided by them can support one or two developers working part time but not a team of developers working on a product full time.

What we need is more small companies that sell services to governments. But this implies sales teams, support contracts, and a lot of organization. It's not something that every one want to do and as the skills to start.

Absolutely, there's not whole organisations maintaining open source software that are sustained by EU funding! I was merely pointing out that the EU isn't just shoving taxpayer money into the pockets of multinationals.