We'll see how it goes this time.
If they once again go for creating their own forks, instead of financing development of existing software then I'll know the initiative failed.
Also imho their 'questions' mentioned in the comment kinda feel like they have answer baked in - like it's foregone conclusion.
Still - I hope EU will just have a decent program financing or contributing in any shape or form to development of OSS.
I get your pain point, but the stated objective is "Sovereignty" so having a fully localized OSS ecosystem that is anchored (can't be bought or moved) and operates independent of outsider (US, China, Russia, ...) upstream is in that case non negotiable.
Whether the EU will ever produce the necessary public investment to achieve this remains an open question.
> they once again go for creating their own forks, instead of financing development of existing software then I'll know the initiative failed.
Once again? When did they do that? They have been funding various open source projects (like VLC, Libre Office) for quite a while:
> Still - I hope EU will just have a decent program financing or contributing in any shape or form to development of OSS.
I think at this point we're beyond that, we already have these programs and they seem to be expanding. EU-STF is one such example, then there are other organizations supported by the EU in various ways, that also helps fund OSS, like NLnet Foundation.