alt Hacker NewsOpen Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet
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Seems like a lot of comments here are US centric. As if Canonical and Suse don't exist and aren't Europe based/focused?
Also a lot of arguments that MS provides some total package which is irreplaceable which just isn't true. That argument seems to conflate software dominance in the US (is that even true? Linux runs most back end) with some kind of hardware dominance. MS doesn't provide hardware beyond some limited set of desktop hardware which most businesses don't even use. Most business lease from the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo both front and back end. This should probably be the real discussion.
I see no mention of the core projects which have been maintained and being used for decades. xz, libexpat, openzfs, NetworkManager and way too many tiny projects which glue the entire linux system. That's how you start to reclaim the open internet. Where is pihole, who is trying to debloat the web? Where is dnsmasq, which is most widely used dns server?
Some great initiatives being funded, especially: >PeerTube for Institutions — Make PeerTube easier to manage and moderate at scale
I'd LOVE to see more institutions and NGOs move to PeerTube.
The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary, part of the well funded Wikimedia that spends over a quarter of its budget on "Building analytics and ML services" https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
Motis (transit calculator), Clearance (OSM contribution analysis) and StreetComplete (OSM contribution gamified) : very important assets for the free mapping community. Good news !
There is also a lot of indirect funding in the form of the governments purchasing habits: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-s...
In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.
I previously received funding from nlnet and they have been great to work with. I highly recommend working with them, and they have been supporting amazing projects!
With a catchphrase like "reclaim the public internet" I expected they were funding Anubis https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/ (don't get me wrong, they've got a neat list of projects, I'm just quibbling with what's "public internet" about solar powered motherboards or Ada bootstrapping.)
NLnet is a great initiative. Among the numerous projects they have supported is Marginalia [1] search engine.
https://nlnet.nl/project/SSH-Stamp/
SSH Stamp looks very interesting at a glance, but there is no information about a project page or a developer. A search for it with DuckDuckGo does not find any information beyond that page. I wonder if this is real. If there is anything open source about this, it is nothing like the open source projects I know.
nlnet are gamechangers. Without them we'd have no Lemmy, and I would still be on Reddit
Something I came across yesterday was OpenCloud. I think with many of these small projects being funded it's not clear there's a cohesive vision of how to reclaim the internet. I mean the browser itself is owned by big tech. I don't know whether you have to start again at the protocol level.
Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.
https://nlnet.nl/project/Ada-bootstrap/
This is something I would be interested in but there is no link to a project page. I sent a message alerting them in case it was accidentally left out.
The issue is that it is not enough to throw money at random projects. There should be at least high-level plan and rather specific goals. Frankly, "reclaim public internet" is a nice slogan, but it is too abstract to be a good, meaningful goal.
Also money is but a one issue. Free software has a big problem with coordination of efforts. Though many claim it is its strength, it is a handicap when it comes to political action (and free software is a political action).
In short, what we need is an equivalent of grand industrial policies of the past, but this time for free software.
Would be cool if a lot of these get added to PortableApps for easy install and updates...
I wish we could do something around cookies, trackers, ads,
Like a simpler web server for http that only supports certain.
Risk appetite, accountability and support. These go against open source. Gone are the days when businesses were desperate for some software that just works. During my days at apache, I have seen large businesses officially allowing their devs to contribute to opensource full time. IBM being a large contributor. Now people can only accept managed software and hardware. Even if it opensource, it should be managed. Cloud providers offer a lot of opensource as managed services. That sells. No more wild-west.
Money down the toilet. Job #1 is to make a google replacement. Job #2, a domestic phone manufacturer (with its own plaftorm / appstore). These are the two primary portals to "The Internet". Without meaningful replacements, they're still on Uncle Sam's plantation. China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.
They are so far behind. Focus! Spitballing 42 random projects is a luxury Europe does not have.
One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.
The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.
Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).
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They applied in October 2024 and starting receiving funding (€ 50.000 max) in May 2025. This is beyond ridicoulness.
This is beyond ridiculousness.
An AI agent could make a far better job than many well-paid but extremely lazy european bureaurats.
Let alone the corruption, if they choose their friend projects.
I'm pro an unite Europe but current European Union is beyond shame.
The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.
Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.
While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.
The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.