I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.

Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.

Actually, the grant process at NLnet is supposed super light weight. It consists of a single short form (https://nlnet.nl/propose) with very little boilerplate. No consultants needed...

Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.

My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.

That is very true. Budget is something that most organisations are fairly bad at. So it does make a lot of sense for e.g. the European Commission to work with organisations like NLnet that do get it.

> I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

I agree that systems are far from perfect at the time. I also think that governments have been putting money into digital tech for much less time than private enterprise.

Regarding the money that gets to the developers, I added a comment on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770310

The application process is pretty easy. I applied a couple of years ago. I did take it seriously, but I probably should have put more time and effort into my message and presentation.

What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.

Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.

> And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

Agreed, but keep in mind this must be compared to the phenomenal inefficiency of the developing monopolist oligarchy to the end user. I find it interesting how much harsher people are when some fraction of government money is siphoned, when the current alternative is *most* of it being siphoned, albeit without passing through government first.

The implicit claim often seems to be that people see less value per dollar when money passes through the government. But this is pure nonsense, particularly when you compare things like the cost of healthcare in the US vs everywhere else. Or generally most cases where government managed services can be compared to consolidated markets.

Just because some government money is wasted in ways that are less applicable to private industry doesn't at all mean the private industry creates more value for the consumer.

Except for the fact that big consultancies who receive most of the government contracts, have zero contribution to the open source ecosystem.

When you pay 1000 USD to Microsoft to use o365, how much of that goes to the developers?

The argument of "but very little of that money will go to *actual* development" is not looking at the alternative being used now.

>>In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP.

That's a terrifying statistic. It doesn't sound very sustainable.

In the US it's 40%. The 10% difference is explained by the US having limited to no public healthcare or pensions. Those are largely paid for privately, which pretty much balances it out.