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The Sovereign Tech Fund is a funding program from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, aimed at providing financial support to open-source software. The initial funds were allocated by the Bundestag in May 2022. [1] [2]
According to the Federal budget of Germany plan, the program aims to promote and secure open-source foundational technologies. [3] It intends to make the open-source ecosystem more resilient against external attacks, thereby enhancing cybersecurity and resilience across the German economy. This initiative fulfills a demand from the coalition government. [4]
The funding is described as time-limited and targeted at specific challenges or security vulnerabilities. [5] [6]
In 2022, the program had a budget of 13 million Euros, [7] which increased to approximately 22 million euros in 2023 and is expected to reach up to 16 million euros in 2024. The program is initially attached to the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovations and is led by Adriana Groh and Fiona Krakenbürger.
Both founders had worked for similar organizations. Adriana Groh had experience from the Open Knowledge Foundation's Prototype Fund. [8] Fiona Krakenbürger had previously worked at the Open Technology Fund. [9] [10]
As of July 2023, the following projects received funding: [7] [11]
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client that also functions as a personal information manager with a calendar and contactbook, as well as an RSS feed reader, chat client (IRC/XMPP/Matrix), and news client. Operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird community. As a cross-platform application, Thunderbird is available for Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Android, and Linux. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla's Firefox, and Thunderbird is an interface built on top of that Web browser.
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++. It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.
Anjuta was an integrated development environment written for the GNOME project. It had support for C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python and Vala programming language. In May 2022, the project was archived due to a lack of maintainers. Since October 2022 the project's former homepage no longer exists and the domain is owned by an SBOBET, an Indonesian gambling website. It has been superseded by GNOME Builder.
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.
Balsa is a lightweight email client written in C for the GNOME desktop environment.
GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, which works to coordinate the efforts in the GNOME project.
Seahorse is a GNOME front-end application for managing passwords, PGP and SSH keys. Seahorse integrates with a number of apps including Nautilus file manager, Epiphany browser and Evolution e-mail suite. It has HKP and LDAP key server support.
OpenEmbedded (OE) is a build automation framework and cross-compile environment used to create Linux distributions for embedded devices. The framework is developed by the OpenEmbedded community, which was formally established in 2003. OpenEmbedded is the recommended build system of the Yocto Project, which is a Linux Foundation workgroup that assists commercial companies in the development of Linux-based systems for embedded products.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) which currently runs on IA-32, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V based computers. The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD — the first free Unix system — and has since continously been the most commonly used BSD-derived operating system.
The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is an annual Linux, open source and free software conference held in Los Angeles, California, since 2002. Despite having Linux in its name, SCALE covers all open source operating systems and software. It is a volunteer-run event.
The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects.
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is available for many platforms, including servers, desktops, handheld devices, and embedded systems.
The Open Source Business Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. (OSBA) is a German non-profit that operates Europe's biggest network of companies and organizations developing, building and using open source software.
Mapbox is an American provider of custom online maps for websites and applications such as Foursquare, Lonely Planet, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel, Instacart, and Strava. Since 2010, it has rapidly expanded the niche of custom maps, as a response to the limited choice offered by map providers such as Google Maps.
Mailvelope is free software for end-to-end encryption of email traffic inside of a web browser that integrates itself into existing webmail applications. It can be used to encrypt and sign electronic messages, including attached files, without the use of a separate, native email client using the OpenPGP standard.
WireGuard is a communication protocol and free and open-source software that implements encrypted virtual private networks (VPNs). It aims to be lighter and better performing than IPsec and OpenVPN, two common tunneling protocols. The WireGuard protocol passes traffic over UDP.
The OpenJS Foundation is an organization that was founded in 2019 from a merger of JS Foundation and Node.js Foundation. OpenJS promotes the JavaScript and web ecosystem by hosting projects and funds activities that benefit the ecosystem. The OpenJS Foundation is made up of 38 open source JavaScript projects including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, Node-RED and webpack. Founding members included Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
Gatsby is an open-source static site generator built on top of Node.js using React and GraphQL. It provides over 2500 plugins to create static sites based on sources as Markdown documents, MDX, images, and numerous content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal and more. Since version 4 Gatsby also supports server-side rendering (SSR) and Deferred Static Generation for rendering dynamic websites on a Node.js server. Gatsby is developed by Gatsby, Inc. which also offered a cloud service, Gatsby Cloud, for hosting Gatsby websites, which was terminated by Netlify in August 2023 to unify it with Netlify Cloud.
