On Thursday, the Bundestag’s budget committee along with the majority of the traffic light coalition factions decided to increase funding for the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF). In total, approximately EUR 29 million is now available for 2025. This is about 4 million euros, or 15 percent, more than initially planned by the Federal Cabinet. Of this, about 3.4 million euros will go directly to the STF, whose budget for 2025 should initially amount to 15 million euros.
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The plan will also bring in an additional €590,000 “bug resilience program“, for which a total of 2 million euros will now be available in 2025. The aim is to ensure that security vulnerabilities in software are not only found, but also actually fixed. In total, the STF ends up at around 19 million euros Whereas in 2024 it will be reduced to only 17 million.
SFT plays a central role in the development of open source software as a fundamental digital technology. Among other things, STF managers organize competitions to promote active participation in open source infrastructure.
Traffic lights have disappointed supporters of free software so far
“These investments make us more independent from big providers, more resilient to digital crises and boost Germany’s digital sovereignty,” stressed Anna Kasotzky, digital policy envoy of the SPD parliamentary group. Mike Ausendorf, the Green Party’s digital policy spokesperson, emphasized that Germany is playing a “leading role in open source.”
The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) were disappointed with the course of the traffic light in 2022. In its alliance agreement, the alliance clearly emphasized 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, dependence on, for example, Microsoft will become stronger. The federal government’s licensing costs to proprietary software providers have recently been as high as billions. The OSB Alliance simply demanded that the administration completely transition its IT to open source.
(usz)
