Reboost ♻️ plz: In light of increased uncertainty on the reliability on the US, European democracies should strengthen their strategic autonomy: this also includes autonomy from #Microsoft #Windows in the public and private sector.

https://eu-os.gitlab.io proposes to develop together a Community-led Proof-of-Concept for a free/libre replacement of Windows. Follow us on Mastodon and join the Matrix chat at https://matrix.to/#/#eu-os:kde.org to receive updates and help.

/cc @EC_OSPO
#Linux #Trump #Endof10

We've signed an open letter to the European Commission in support for @EC_NGI

Their funding has enabled us and many other FLOSS projects to develop and maintain great software, from which everybody benefits.

However, their own funding is probably cut next year, which would have a big negative impact to FLOSS projects.

Read more at:
https://f-droid.org/2024/07/23/ngi-funding-open-letter.html

Your attention please:

Maybe you've never heard about it but since 2020, the Next Generation Internet programs, a sub-branch of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program, have been cascading funding (via @nlnet calls) open source software in Europe. The massive fundings have enabled a great deal of free software development in recent years, and all without too many constraints (with too few transparency and monitoring, though… which urgently needs to be improved). Unfortunately, these NGI programs seem to have been withdrawn from the next round of Horizon Europe fundings to give priority to AI bullshit.

As a result, we’ve been invited to contact the National Contact Points, Horizon Europe’s national representatives, to express our concern and the importance of maintaining public funding for free software. With this in mind, we wrote an open letter at Petites Singularités and thought it would make sense to fork it out with Hackstub and ARN in Strasbourg for the French NCP to get other French-speaking free software orgas to sign. I’m thinking in particular of the software that has benefited from this funding, such as Yunohost, but also of the Kittens that use this same software.

We can also announce that this topic will be part of the central theme of the next #OFFDEM in Brussels, on the first weekend of February 2025. There's not yet an exact title, but we’ll be discussing financing and community structuring for free software over the next few years.

If you want to sign the french-speaking version of this letter, there's a pad for it: https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI

#ngi #publicMoneyPublicCode #floss