マリウス

Your numbers don’t check out, please provide sources. The Linux Kernel has around 40 million lines, the OpenBSD kernel around 7. You might have mistakenly counted OpenBSD/NetBSD as a whole system (the base installation), instead of solely the kernel.

They contributed code that they needed, that is not giving back. I am speaking about actual long-term maintenance and/or money, which isn’t mentioned anywhere.

See, the problem with these code contributions is that they are just that: One time effort. In most cases, this code will be handed over to the core maintainers, who will then have to deal with it for the rest of the project’s lifecycle. There are many documented instances in which FOSS projects are actually suffering because of contributions like this, as they are struggling to maintain the added features long term.

But all the people downvoting this care about is that a public money drain like the military writes some code and throws it into the faces of FOSS developers, even completely disregarding whether these improvements are actually relevant for the everyday user of the software. And again, by contributing I am referring to actually funding the project with significant amounts. We are speaking of a public entity that spends multiple millions on a single fighter jet.

We shouldn’t be celebrating military forces, a branch of the government that is notoriously expensive for tax payers, to use FOSS without giving anything significant back in return.

s/rich/dumb/g

This device is not worth the illusionary pricetag of $1423 (converted). Whoever buys this has more pressing issues than their privacy.

deleted by creator

If it has a decent camera, use it as a dedicated webcam. If the camera is just okay, convert it to a car dash-cam or a home security camera with integrated UPS, storage, and even fallback connectivity via mobile networks. Use it as a dedicated gaming device, or a music player for non-IoT speakers. Convert it to an LTE modem and make it a fallback for your home internet. Run a Monero node on it. Or a Briar mailbox. Host a personal website on it and make it available via DynDNS. Make use of the phone’s sensors, e.g. the light sensor or the microphone for home automation. Connect it to speakers and use it as a Bitcoin price monitor that plays “You Suffer” by Napalm Death every time BTC passes a certain threshold. Or just use it as a digital photo frame on your desk.

“How the German government failed to build a meaningful IT industry over the past thirty years due to the lack of knowledgeable workforce and a failed education system to train them, and is now looking into open source for help to get them out of their US controlled infrastructure.”

Humans need to stop naming things “Snowflake”. We have too many. Perform an internet search with “snowflake SUFFIX”, where SUFFIX is any other term, eg Crypto or Database or Movie, and you will get at least one hit.

NLNet

The main problem with these Funds, especially European ones, are the inability of the people running the funds to properly identify technologies and direct funding to the right projects. If you have ever taken a look at NLNet’s projects you will find how there’s a 20:1 ratio of projects that are like “Errrr… okay” versus “Yes, that’s a useful thing to fund”. It also doesn’t help the case that a noticeable amount of the funded projects appear relatively low in activity already.

For example, NLNet is funding bringing an extremely niche and largely irrelevant Android ROM to an even more niche phone and helping it release an update (?!?), while on the other hand you cannot find any support for a smartphone-related project that makes actual sense. I’d argue that there are plenty more successful “de-googled” Android ROMs that have a better track record and a larger user base than Replicant. And I’d also argue that there are a lot more reasonable Pinephone projects (cough cough Camera cough) to sponsor than bringing Android to it to make it… another Android phone?

Horizon Europe

Horizon on the other hand has a different focus. It is not an open-source fund, but a broad “technology research” fund that ventures into health, environmental and many more areas. Horizon is very much politically driven. One famous example is the Horizon 2021-2022 programme agenda, which they unfortunately deleted, that describes HORIZON-CL3-2021-FCT-01-02: Lawful interception using new and emerging technologies (5G & beyond, quantum computing and encryption). Horizon is the very initiative that ProtonMail received funding from, btw.

Long story short, I don’t think more funds and programs are needed, but rather a different way of how the existing ones are being run. From what I see, in many cases funds either completely miss the target, or they suffer from NIH syndrome when there are existing alternatives.