Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund giving €1m to the Gnome foundation
Why, in Germany of all countries they should have supported KDE. Granted, it’s already doing fine, but then Gnome’s problem is not with lack of money.
Comment on Painful day for tech titans as EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into them
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It would be amazing if even a small portion of EU fines for big abusive tech companies went to supporting open source alternatives.
In the Linux world, we are seeing right now how much things like Valve putting a bit of money into Linux, Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund giving €1m to the Gnome foundation, etc, is improving things.
Imagine if even 1% of these big tech fines went into a pot that an independent body chooses to invest in various open projects. It’d be huge.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Probably because Gnome is used in more businesses and Gnome is pretty good at implementing accessibility features, which was one of the main conditions of the grant.
And it’s not a big deal, KDE is already getting a lot of support, and the work Gnome is doing is going to be an open, cross-desktop framework. It benefits KDE too.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
and Gnome is pretty good at implementing accessibility features, which was one of the main conditions of the grant.
At the same time yes and … they are very unorthodox in their understanding of what makes things more accessible.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not making their DE yet another Windows clone does not mean it’s inaccessible.
I get it, you clearly have a personal issue with Gnome. Just don’t use it then. There’s no need to be upset about an amazing open source project getting support and improving the accessibility stack for the entire Linux desktop.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I apologize, but I initially read “imagine if just 1% of these fines went into pot” and I was 100% on board for a brief time
AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, but until then we can support these projects. Even a one-time 10€ donation can go a huge distance, or monthly 1€ even. These add up.
P.S. To any open source devs, please allow us to donate yearly recurring 10-15€! There are so many projects to support, but i have to live from something as well.
barsoap@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The EU spends plenty of grant money on FLOSS. It’s part of the general Horizon grants, there’s a bug bounty programme (as replacement for the hackatons which didn’t work as well as imagined), and last but not least the EU publishes lots of software as FLOSS.
You don’t want to make that stuff contingent on big tech misbehaving. The fines go into the general EU budget but the EU doesn’t get to keep it, membership fees are lowered in the next year by the same amount thus the windfall goes to member state’s budgets.