The European Union must keep funding free software
22-07-2024
This page: https://becha.unciv.nl/open-letter-to-eu-to-keep-ngi-funded.html
Original: https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI
Initially published by petites singularites. English translation provided by OW2.
If you want to sign the letter, please publish the letter on your website and complete the table below.
Open Letter to the European Commission
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme,
fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet’s calls). This
year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that
Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to supporting the European software infrastructure,
as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find
this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free
software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs
the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural
support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a
European infrastructure.
Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North
American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organisations.
Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:
"Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe” ;
"A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life” ;
"A structured ecosystem of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons”.
In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed
by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.
NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means
of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope - from hardware to application,
operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed
in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.
Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as “widening
countries” [1], currently both a success and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before
us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does.
It encourages implementing projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of
common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up
development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.
While the USA, China or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and
infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can’t afford this renunciation.
Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential
vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and
know-how, while allowing an international collaboration.
This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological
sovereignty is central, and free software allows to address it while acting for peace and sovereignty in
the digital world as a whole.
In this perspective, we urge you to claim for preserving the NGI programme as part of the 2025 funding programme.