On Thursday, the Bundestag's Budget Committee decided to increase the funding for the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) with the majority of the parliamentary groups in the traffic light coalition. A total of almost 29 million euros is now available for 2025. This is around 4 million euros or 15 per cent more than initially planned by the Federal Cabinet. Almost 3.4 million euros of this is directly attributable to the STF, whose budget for 2025 was initially set at 15 million euros.
590,000 more than planned will also flow into the ‘Bug Resilience Programme’ coordinated by the STF, for which a total of 2 million euros will now be available in 2025. It is intended to ensure that security vulnerabilities in software are not only found, but also actually fixed. In total, the STF will end up with around 19 million euros, compared to just 17 million in 2024.
The SFT plays a central role in the development of open source software as a basic digital technology. Among other things, the STF managers organised competitions to promote active collaboration on open source infrastructures. The government has so far disappointed free software advocates
‘These investments make us less dependent on large providers, more resilient to digital crises and promote Germany's digital sovereignty,’ emphasised Anna Kassautzki, digital policy rapporteur for the SPD parliamentary group. Maik Außendorf, digital policy spokesperson for the Greens, emphasised that Germany is thus taking on a ‘pioneering role in open source’
The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) had expressed their disappointment with the course taken by the Ampel in 2022. In its coalition agreement, the government had explicitly emphasised the importance of open standards and interfaces as well as open source for digital sovereignty. However, there are no concrete plans for an alternative hyperscaler, especially for cloud projects.
Instead, dependencies on Microsoft, for example, would be further cemented. The federal government's licence costs for proprietary software providers have recently reached a high level in the billions. The OSB Alliance has just called for the administration to switch its IT completely to open source.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Nice! Leaves me wondering why the funding was increased tho. Is it because the SFT projects have been successful so far? Or because they were not moving fast enough? Or perhaps simply because more money was needed to achieve this year's aims?
Granted, 4 mil might not be an enormous amount for an institution this size.