I’m thankful for the STF. Germany is one of the few countries doing something. But it is not strategic software-development.
* They don’t employ software-developers. No safety for the developers. No control over developers.
* It is only temporary.
* The projects need to apply repeatingly for funding. Wasting time and resources and chausing worries.
The how planet needs Linux, BSD, cURL, ffmpeg, Flatpak. We need to ensure that this work for the people.
We feed for 30 years constantly money into monopolies. We shall feed the next century constantly money into things the people need.
Many developers of Linux and GCC are paid. Because companies decided it is necessary.
I don't really agree here. I think what they are doing is pretty strategic, especially given the relatively limited money they have.
There's basically two sides to funding software that are actually rather different
1. Accelerator phase: getting the software to a point where it can reasonably replace some foreign closed source enterprise option (i.e. feature devlopment). This sort of thing is often highly speculative. It should be project based, with concrete deliverables, and done with a non-permanent grant. If things go reasonably well, then there can be followup grants. This is what the STA focuses on, and is a major gap in the FOSS world.
2. Established phase: Once the software is actually ready for adoption (thanks to help from the STA!), and gets integrated into government functions, then the agencies that *use* the software should be setting up enterprise support contracts that give long-term support and stability to the projects they've adopted. A good example of this would be Nextcloud who has multiple such contracts with different parts of Germany (also other European organizations). This part is better off being done by the agency that *uses* the software, rather than having the STA do it. Some of these agencies do in fact also have internal software developers that work on Nextcloud.
I don't think it's a shortcoming of the STA that they're focused on point 1 rather than point 2, I think if they were forced to do both, they'd actually be less effective at what they're doing.
The STA is basically trying to fill the role that venture capital plays in getting a startup ready to take on customers, except the STA doesn't take an ownership stake, and they focus on FOSS.
> They don’t employ software-developers. No safety for the developers. No control over developers.
Thank god they don't employ them. It would be terrible for everyone involved, especially for the developers. The government in Germany is a terrible employer for someone with high work ethics and a dedication to their craft. They crush your soul with bureaucracy and drain your spirit with rules and regulation. On top of that, they pay is ridiculously bad. I'm a principle engineer at a private company and some government agency thought they could poach me with 4k a month, LOL, that's not enough to pay rent and put food on the table for a family of 3 in my city (remember, we pay ~50% in tax and social contributions).
The construction would be a private company that works with the government. That exists already - I had applied for one before - and the pay was completely competitive, for German salaries. 80K.
What kind of program was that? Permanent employment contract (no "Befristung") without any co-financing through private investors, private grants, or the company's revenue?
This might be possible with public grants, but I've never seen it. They usually come with additional strings attached, such as being a de minimis subsidy (limited to 300k in a rolling 3 year window), requiring private co-funding (e.g. 50% for the whole project), being limited to a couple of months or maybe 2-3 years max, etc., so for competitive pay, you must almost always rely on some kind of "mixed financing": every penny above the salary that TVöD allows must be acquired from sources other than the gran. ymmv, part of the lack of attractiveness of public funding is the fact that each program differs in a million different ways.
It was a normal developer position (with PhD bonus possibly) at a private enterprise that only worked on public projects. No Befristung, no other surprises I got aware of. I was also a bit surprised that this existed, because with private-public constructs like Fraunhofer there usually are the limitations you mentioned (and the low salary). Here the limitations probably didn't exist as the company was 100% private.
I don't think the Fellowship qualifies as "working for STF". These people are being paid/supported for the work they do in their own projects. They're not being paid to work on/work for STF to help them steer/analyze/control the other projects that are being funded.
EDIT: OPs comment can be understood in multiple ways: Should STF hire Developers to work on their own projects, or should they hire Developers to understand/guide/manage the funded projects in a better way.
>> The projects need to apply repeatingly for funding.
> Still better than no funding at all.
Exactly, plus no grantor I know operates on a blank check basis, its always budgeting, prioritisation, and new applications and grants are for a specific period, can come in tranches, etc. Just how these things work, Germany or not.
> Compensation is based on the collective agreement for the public sector in Germany (TVöD-Bund) and will range from €64,000 to €82,000 per year for a full-time position, including 30 days of vacation, depending on qualifications and experience.
LOL. That's €32,122 net for a full time position. And you're not even allowed to work from a place in southern Europe where you can actually live from that amount of money.
It's more like €40,000-50,000 after taxes and contributions to health care, social security and the German pension fund. Enough for a modest lifestyle in Germany. Many OSS contributors aren't motivated by money after all.
Go to https://www.nettolohn.de and enter 64000€, choose Berlin, keep the rest. That's not enough for a modest lifestyle for a family, proven by the fact that with such an income, you're already entitled for social benefits (Wohngeld) in an average German city of 200.000 inhabitants for a family of 4: https://www.wohngeld.org/einkommen/#Wohngeldtabellen_fuer_Mi...
This is the government telling you: you can come work full time for us, but you'll not be able to provide for your family, that's why you can stand in line with all those who don't work at all to claim your benefits.
Assuming you don't pay Kirchensteuer, it's almost €40,000.
> you're already entitled for social benefits (Wohngeld)
No, you're slightly above the threshold but in any case this doesn't say much. If you're talking about families, I'd also assume that your partner earns a little extra.
Anyway, the median gross income in Germany is €54,000, so you seem to be implying that the majority of Germans are unable to live a decent life. Maybe you should talk more to people outside your social bubble?
The point isn't how much Google spends on stuff in general, it's their wallet. What's important is how much they contribute back to the development of the tools they actively use to fill that wallet.
They contribute a lot of open source software themselves, you can probably find a better example of a company benefitting from such but not contributing much
Just to be clear, that wasn't a judgment value either way from my side.
This being said I would expect they contribute a lot for ffmpeg, which was mentioned explicitly, since this is such a critical building block for them.
The crazy thing is that there is a model where governments / states / localities can migrate away from windows / Microsoft 365 ... and use part of the savings to fund open-source
if this was done across Europe we'd have sovereign open-source tech stack that is strong, well funded, and used by 10s of millions in the EU alone.
I have no idea why simple ideas like this are not persuade instead lots of incoherent, almost desperate distributed efforts are preferred.
ultimately I do believe that the bureaucrats in the EU are insanely disconnected from reality.
The process you're describing is underway. Schleswig-Holstein, Munich, Leon, and the Austrian military all come to mind as recent examples of that sort of migration, and then pivoting savings into support contracts for open source.
That process is super important yes, but what about cases where the relevant government bodies don't think the open source offering is ready yet for them?
That is where the STF steps in, and gives funding to open source projects so that they can develop to a point where their software is ready for stable adoption by governments.
this is what I mean by distributed, unconcentrated change.
you will never make meaningful progress by those initiatives, there should be an echo of the US investment in data centers or china's investment in EVs.
bigger, systematic, with immediate impact on the software / cloud stack in the EU first and globally.
Would it make more sense if this Sovereign Tech Agency behaved less like a Sovereign Tech Fund and simply hired the developers? Or is civil servants developing OSS commodities too much of a heresy?
> is civil servants developing OSS commodities too much of a heresy
I see two problems here for Germany. First, the salaries of civil servants are regulated, and might be not what most developers, even German ones, expect. In addition civil servant status is bundled with privileges and duties that make it painful to lay it down. Most developers are used to job flexibility though, especially as, as I said, the salaries are not going to be great.
Second, there is a decision by the Constitutional Court that prohibits the state from competing with the market. Temporary grants to independent actors are among other things a way to work around it.
The first part boils down to any civil servant: inflexibility and lower wages aren't for everyone, but it should not be impossible to attract talent intrinsically motivated to contribute to public cause. Especially when it's OSS.
The second part is a bit closer to the heresy angle: new public management forbids competing with "free market". Of course, many EU governments have always found and used all kinds of loopholes to support "independent enterprises" like railways, airlines, power companies and banks once they become too big to fail.
Maybe commodity open source software has reached that level too...
I agree on the second point. I assume we all know that this weird EU free market religion is harmful. The EU would be 1000% better for us, without the economy stuff it was originally build upon.
Free markets are dysfunctional and never fair. How we now? Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta proof it every day. The US and China don’t even care about fairness. Why they should?
Someone mentioned above the limited money STF has. I agree. I did not considered it noteworthy.
There is also the option of structural funding (Strukturförderung in german) where important organizations receive multi-year contracts instead of short term project funding.
We do all this self-congratulation around funding OSS companies and then end up with OSS companies that exist only thanks to government subsidization. Why? Isn’t governmental control over funding what we hate about Microsoft? What is so bad about letting real customers decide which companies need funding?
Governments are real customers. The German government, I guess, pays about 30 times more annually to Microsoft than the budget of the STF. The other component of sovereign tech is that governments are actually using FOSS. There is some room there for improvement.
Then charge a fair price for your work (ie the software you deliver). That's the completely fair solution for all sides of the equation. People who don't want your stuff don't get stuck with the bill and people who do want your stuff aren't taking it for free.
> The STF is run by politologists with no clue. They fund flashy web apps that they "understand" and packaging.
That is complete nonsense. Where do you get this "information"?
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech lists OpenSSL, rusttls, Junit, pipewire, samba, varnish-cache, curl, Fortran, even friggin GNU coreutils and others. None of those are "flashy web apps".
We feed for 30 years constantly money into monopolies. We shall feed the next century constantly money into things the people need.
Many developers of Linux and GCC are paid. Because companies decided it is necessary.