Public Funding of Open Source Technologies
summary
Argues for a European open technology fund modeled on the U.S. Open Technology Fund (which funds Signal, Tor, WireGuard and runs at roughly $20M/year) to pay for maintenance and audits rather than only prototypes; cites EU FOSSA (~€1M/year) that found and fixed serious Putty bugs and the Prototype Fund that only covers new prototypes. Recommends independent NGO operation, very low application friction, no nationality restrictions, and funding that rewards bug bounty + fix with a 20% fix bonus to ensure usable, sustained infrastructure.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 1:07Software as public infrastructure
- 6:25Government role in open source
- 10:19Digital sovereignty and decentralization
- 14:29Maintenance of open source projects
- 19:19EU FOSSA program lessons
- 22:06Designing a digital infrastructure fund
- 28:01Funding criteria and global vision
- 32:16Call to action and Q&A
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