By EZ in News — Oct 22, 2024

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Invested $25M to Support Free & Open-Source Projects

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) announced it has invested nearly $25 million (€23 million) in 60 global open-source technologies over the past two years. During this time, it received over 500 submissions proposing more than €114 million in work.

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Sovereign Tech Fund has enabled open-source projects provide much needed maintenance to their software, improve security, and make important enhancements for "foundational open-source technologies."

Established in October 2022, the fund has received government support of €11.5 million for 2023, and €17 million for 2024. Last week, the budget committee of the Bundestag decided to increase the Sovereign Tech Fund's current allocation by €4 million for 2025.

"With nearly 500 submissions proposing over €114 million in work since we started accepting applications, the need for support has never been more clear. By financing critical projects like Log4j, we’re commissioning much-needed maintenance, security work, and improvements in the public interest. The work on these components benefits all the companies, organizations, and individuals who depend on the open technologies that comprise our shared digital infrastructure," said the fund in a blog post.

Projects that have received investment include FreeBSD, Mamba, Samba, PHP, GNOME, Reproducible Builds, GFortran, systemd, FFmpeg, GStreamer, Log4j, Drupal, Fortran, among others.
- A complete list of supported projects can be found here.
STF also initiated the Bug Resilience Program, aimed at bolstering the resilience of open-source software. This includes services like technical debt management, security audits, and a bug bounty platform to address vulnerabilities.

In August, the fund announced the Fellowship for Maintainers initiative, which will support up to five maintainers of critical open-source components for 12 months, focusing on work that's hard to quantify for funding applications.

"Over the last year, we’ve made much progress towards becoming an independent and permanent organization, working closely with SPRIND [German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation] and our partners at German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, which funds us," was stated in the blog.

Learn more about the general state of open-source project funding in this presentation by Kara Sowles Deloss, Open Source Program Manager at GitHub.