Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund unveils a program to fund maintainers of open source projects that’s expected to be operational by year’s end.

  • chobeat
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    4 months ago

    They just allocate according to different logic than the mainstream american FOSS ideology. For instance, hackerbros, and you seem to say the same, will tell you that resources should be centralized into the biggest project in its own category to add more and more features to it. Regardless of cooptation from the private sector, this is generally a bad idea. It leads to a monoculture and monoculture leads to critical bugs impacting enormous amount of users. Also it’s predicated on the idea that there should be only a single way to fullfill a specific use-case, and that it’s the same throughout the world, erasing cultural, economic, social, biological and political differences. Optimization requires standardization, standardization requires erasure and suppression of minoritarian voices and it’s therefore oppressive. Maximizing it is not a good idea, both for technical, political and ethical reasons.

    Seeding new projects that better fit local contexts, or simply produce diverse alternatives raises diversity and in turns raises resilience of the software ecosystem as a whole.