alt Hacker NewsThe point you expressed was indignation at FOSS bounties paid by the Fediversity project out of a fraction of a single EUR 3m EU grant their consortium won being less than the full time salary of EU devs.
If you were trying to more widely insinuate that this third party dosing out small-to-modest incentives to individuals to do a bit of hacking on Fediverse stuff was the only thing the EU was doing to support Open Source or represented some sort of ceiling on the amounts EU-funded projects working on FOSS could pay their developers, it would be even more wrong.
Plenty of valid criticisms of the EU's cyber non-dependence strategy or the detail of grant and equity funding programmes for research and building stuff and how they weight FOSS (that's part of the reason for the consultation!) but you need to have the slightest idea what exists to get into those...
I took the Fediversity project as an example because it was mentioned above in the comment and not an example of something I wanted to specifically point it. Truth to be told 90% of other EU funds are similar if not the same in the context of grants, and no, I don't find it sufficient, and no, I don't think such strategy will yield anything worth the salt. You will keep the developers have fun with their projects but something worthwhile? Forget. It doesn't exist at such minuscule scale.
The only bigger denominator in terms of funds is Horizon which is completely political, and not worth mentioning at all, if that's what you wanted to suggest. It also operates under minuscule scale in terms of grants (up to 2.5M over 2 years) or funding (1-30M). No possibility for seed rounds which implies you already must be in the business and already have an almost viable product ready to deploy to the market tomorrow (EU bureaucracy calls it TRL6-8). This is all ridiculous and shows how detached from reality people making decisions there are. They even hire "experts" to weigh your application for which you know ... ta-da ... have to hire yet another "expert" to write that application for you. 100s of pages to prove your idea worthy. Once a year. World innovation runs at much much higher pace.
So, sure the R&D environment in EU is built on a very fertile ground and Brussels is doing their best to "call for an evidence" because open-source software is going to save the economy??? Right.