Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: Compared to America and China, #Europe doesn’t invest much in technology. At some ...
Compared to America and China, #Europe doesn’t invest much in technology.
At some point a couple of years ago Macron saw the point of a common European investment fund in technology to avoid ending up as technologic subjects of either side of the Pacific Ocean, but then he came up with the wrong solution - we don’t need “European champions”, as he called them, large enough to compete with the American giants, but a healthy, sustainable and competitive environment for innovation to sprawl. Pick the willing and not the winners.
In absence of a wider strategy to fund European technology, the EU has however, since 2020, allocated a small fund that goes to small European-based open projects that need financial backing to lift off the ground, or to keep the lights on.
The #NGI (Next Generation Internet) doesn’t even get a lot of funding. The previous cluster allocated about €27 million. Peanuts compared to the $8.5 billion that Biden poured into Intel with the CHIPS act, or to the hybrid ownership scheme common for Chinese tech giants. A medium-sized company burns that much money in a single week. However, it’s been enough to fund many European projects that would have begged for Github sponsors otherwise. The list of projects sponsored by NGI includes accessibility and graphics input support for KDE Plasma Wayland, decentralized storage solutions over BitTorrent (Scion), a privacy-preserving infrastructure for electronic payments (GNU Taler), mobile operating systems (PostmarketOS), and much more. All projects that provide open solutions good enough to compete with those provided by non-EU businesses that get much more financial backing, for a tiny fraction of the price tag.
Keeping the funds for NGI would have thus been a no-brainer. Tech talent in Europe apparently can do great things even with little money, imagine what they could do with more money - or, better, with a proper EU-funded investment bank dedicated to fund open tech solutions. Something like what the SVB was for the Silicon Valley, but without the whole profitability, financial mismanagement and high-risk bets factors that took it down. Or something like KfW, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti or EIB are for Germany, Italy and the EU respectively, but with a strong focus on funding a sustainable technological infrastructure on open protocols and open software.
Unfortunately, there’s no mention of NGI in the working draft of the Horizon Europe programs for 2025.
Not sure if it’s a glitch, if it’s an intentional omission or if the EU has other plans to fund open software. But it’d be nice to have some answers.
https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI#
At some point a couple of years ago Macron saw the point of a common European investment fund in technology to avoid ending up as technologic subjects of either side of the Pacific Ocean, but then he came up with the wrong solution - we don’t need “European champions”, as he called them, large enough to compete with the American giants, but a healthy, sustainable and competitive environment for innovation to sprawl. Pick the willing and not the winners.
In absence of a wider strategy to fund European technology, the EU has however, since 2020, allocated a small fund that goes to small European-based open projects that need financial backing to lift off the ground, or to keep the lights on.
The #NGI (Next Generation Internet) doesn’t even get a lot of funding. The previous cluster allocated about €27 million. Peanuts compared to the $8.5 billion that Biden poured into Intel with the CHIPS act, or to the hybrid ownership scheme common for Chinese tech giants. A medium-sized company burns that much money in a single week. However, it’s been enough to fund many European projects that would have begged for Github sponsors otherwise. The list of projects sponsored by NGI includes accessibility and graphics input support for KDE Plasma Wayland, decentralized storage solutions over BitTorrent (Scion), a privacy-preserving infrastructure for electronic payments (GNU Taler), mobile operating systems (PostmarketOS), and much more. All projects that provide open solutions good enough to compete with those provided by non-EU businesses that get much more financial backing, for a tiny fraction of the price tag.
Keeping the funds for NGI would have thus been a no-brainer. Tech talent in Europe apparently can do great things even with little money, imagine what they could do with more money - or, better, with a proper EU-funded investment bank dedicated to fund open tech solutions. Something like what the SVB was for the Silicon Valley, but without the whole profitability, financial mismanagement and high-risk bets factors that took it down. Or something like KfW, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti or EIB are for Germany, Italy and the EU respectively, but with a strong focus on funding a sustainable technological infrastructure on open protocols and open software.
Unfortunately, there’s no mention of NGI in the working draft of the Horizon Europe programs for 2025.
Not sure if it’s a glitch, if it’s an intentional omission or if the EU has other plans to fund open software. But it’d be nice to have some answers.
https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI#