Sovereign Tech Fund – Investing in the Future Today  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Open Source Way]] - Full Title: Sovereign Tech Fund – Investing in the Future Today - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/927cdc0f-e188-4e93-8aa4-89917382a4b0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Focus on Critical Open Source Infrastructure** - The Sovereign Tech Fund supports open source projects that form critical digital infrastructure, essential for economic growth and innovation. - These projects focus on the invisible software components that underpin many applications and societal functions, such as Curl, Fortran, and OpenMLS. Transcript: Speaker 2 The sovereign tech fund, the STF, what is that? Speaker 3 Yeah, thanks for asking. The sovereign tech fund was set up just about a year ago in 2022 to support the open source ecosystem. We focus on critical infrastructure in the public interest. And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about what that means exactly. And we are supported by the German government. So the ministry for economic affairs and climate action wants to safeguard basically the essential components that are needed for economic growth and innovation. Speaker 2 So does that mean your direct employees of Hobart-Habec or not quite directly? Speaker 3 Not quite directly. So we actually, in the first year, were hosted and built up by Shpwint, which is a government owned corporation called the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. It's located in Leipzig. And we just announced this week that we will be spitting out as a subsidiary. So it will be an independent entity at some point in the next coming months for working on that. Speaker 2 Sounds good. And then it's a fund. It's a government-supported fund to, as you said, support open source projects. What kind of projects in a little more detail would be funded by it? Speaker 3 So we fund a broad range of what we call digital infrastructure technologies, all open source. Some examples, we have a whole list on our website. But if you've heard of Coral or OpenMLS, we've invested in Pendulum, which is implementing MemorySafe, NTP and PTP, the language Fortran, which is experiencing a revival, Sequoia PGP. We're doing some stuff with Rust-D-S-Bombs, which is a cyclone DX module for Rust. Those are the kinds of things that we work on. Speaker 2 Okay. Fortran, isn't that like from ages ago and comes right above a sampler or something? I guess that's more one for you, Meko. Speaker 1 Yeah, Fortran, interestingly enough, is used by a lot of applications that use a lot of numeric calculations. And that is, for instance, like climate modeling or as a modeling in that field. And as you can imagine, a language that is that old, like Fortran, has not the developer experience that you would expect from other more modern languages. And that's specifically one field where we support the Fortran community. Okay. Speaker 2 And another example of what I haven't heard of is Carl. What would that be about? Speaker 1 So, Carl is like a Swiss Army knife for downloading data from the Internet. So it's a little command line tool, but it's not only HTTP, it's also like a lot of other protocols, and it's running also on a huge amount of platforms. So it's basically built in everywhere you can expect. Okay. Speaker 2 And these you have identified from the Sarvantec Fund site as being of public interest. Yes. Speaker 1 From our understanding or from our perspective, those components that are building the foundations for a lot of applications, yeah, building also the foundation for our society That is more and more becoming digitized and digital. And those components are the foundation as a seller. ([Time 0:02:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/498d524a-f647-42aa-a780-7277d42ef051)) - **Invisible Labor in Open Source** - The invisible labor involved in maintaining open source infrastructure is crucial but often unacknowledged. - The Fund aims not only to invest in development but also to highlight and support this unseen maintenance work. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, that's correct. So the invisibility is really the an interesting point here. So because it's not only the building breaks are invisible, but it's also like the labor or the work that people do in order to maintain those building breaks is invisible. Speaker 2 I mean, you probably can't make them much more visible, but you can at least give them some funding to drive their projects further. Or do you also deal with the visibility of things? Speaker 3 We try to do both actually. So we do invest in these. We make sure that a lot of these, if they even do get corporate funding, it's often for new features and for development of additional stuff. And from our perspective, we think a lot about maintenance. And I think what Michael was saying about the invisible labor that goes in the everyday stuff that has to be taken care of to keep a component or a library or a framework sort of working For everybody that wants to use it. And since I'm on the communication side, we also do try to highlight that the stuff exists. If you went to a politician or even to someone, you know, one of your friends and said, do you know there's this like little piece of code or this library, this framework that's like in Every single phone in the world, and also has been sent to Mars, that's a curl, you know? And then people will be like, oh, no, I had no idea. Let me look at this app and you're like, oh, it's not an app actually. It's like a piece of code that helps your phone communicate with, you know, server somewhere or downloads things from the internet. And so that's stuff that we are happy to explain. And I'm, you know, making it my mission to explain a little better. Oh, first to understand, of course, and then to explain it to the everyone out there that is not a developer, which I am not. ([Time 0:07:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c21c43d1-d6ff-4728-aeb8-eb5c6ed0d445)) - **How to Apply for Funding** - Apply to the Sovereign Tech Fund via their website with a clear project scope and community backing. - Be prepared for a contract with deliverables aligned to public interest and open source licensing requirements. Transcript: Speaker 3 So as with most such things, it's a little bit of both. We do both outreach and we do also accept applications. We have technologists on our team who are familiar with the Fosse landscape who have worked in this free and open source software in the past and are reaching out sort of researching Projects, talking to the experts in our network. So we do sort of proactively go out there and find new technologies that need our support and that do fit the criteria that we have around public interest and serving vulnerable people Or that are threatened by market consolidation or dependencies. Speaker 1 And the other way also, we are taking applications on our website. So that is a little bit depending on our budget situation. So when this pot is going to be published, it might be different. But for now, we're taking applications. It's applied at the Southern Tech Fund DE and there you have to fill out a form with a lot of questions that we'd like to dig deeper into. And then we have a team that is going to review those applications and then compare to our criteria, but be the fact that earlier, is it critical? ([Time 0:09:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/41201000-9567-4e21-818e-538683980995)) - **Project Requirements for Funding** - Ensure your project is open source, well-defined, and focused on public interest critical infrastructure. - Include maintenance activities in your proposal, as upkeep is a valued and fundable aspect. Transcript: Speaker 3 So the basics are that it needs to be in a language that we understand. So we accept applications in English and in German. It's great if you have some proposed activities that would be covered by the investment or the money that you are asking for from us. So an idea of what the next steps are, what you want to work on. Ideally set up with the community that you're working with. Of course, it needs to be free for your open source software. So we do not hold for example the IP or anything like that once you're done. Like that does go back, it should needs to be under an open source license. And for example, at the moment we're not really looking at, as we talked about before, user facing applications or sort of greenfield or prototypes or things like that. And what makes us unique is that we actually also invest in maintenance and update, security updates. So if you're looking at corporate funders, we know it's not that frequent that they say, hey, take some time, refactor, figure out what's going on and invest in the community or the tooling Of your project. And those are things that we do value. Yeah. And if you're really interested in looking in the details, of course, the list of criteria is on our website. ([Time 0:12:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c5043b82-2fd3-44e8-b8fd-7feb75e8e51a)) - **Open Source Benefits Public and Corporate** - Open source infrastructure benefits both public society and corporate innovation simultaneously. - Maintaining open digital infrastructure accelerates startup innovation and supports economic growth. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, I think there's this one paper. I think it's from the Ford Foundation some years back. It's called Roles and Bridgetts, who did a little bit of research in the whole area of underfunded open source ecosystems. And they are coming from that title, Roles and Bridgetts days, this analogy where you would have public infrastructure that is roads and bridges. And that infrastructure would be used not only by corporates, but also by our citizens of the society, right? And that is pretty much also in the sense of what we understand as public interest. So it's not only the public on health application or something that is government technology for administration, so something like that. Of course, open source components are also used by companies, by startups a lot. So it's in most of the cases, it's the driver for innovation and for velocity. So especially when you compare it to, I don't know, 20 years back, 25 years back, when you as a startup want to build a new innovative product, then you would have to write most of the things From scratch. Today, software engineering is a lot about composing components, right? And those components are in 90% or something from the open source ecosystem. So from our perspective, this whole innovation process, this whole process, how startups build products, this is public interest because it drives our society, it drives our economy. ([Time 0:14:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fa182415-eb72-43c0-ac9b-2b1870a83470)) - **Need for Sustainable Maintenance Funding** - Most companies contribute to features but withdraw before sustainable maintenance investment. - The Fund advocates for industry support to pay maintainers for vital but unpaid maintenance labor. Transcript: Speaker 1 So we're definitely looking into ways how to extend our budget. So that's, I think, not very surprising here. And yeah, especially for 2024, we have some ideas around that. So as we said in the beginning, we just became an own like standalone legal entity that would make things a little bit easier on that end as well. And yeah, we want to create this or increase this kind of awareness towards the corporate world, towards the industry as well, to invite people to fund the open source ecosystem in a More sustainable way as well. So we know that the industry is doing a lot in terms of contributing to open source projects. But from our perspective, this is mostly having a very specific interest or a very specific project that they want to do, right? They have some requirements in a technical sense that needs to be implemented and they want to have this in the repositories so that they can consume it from there. So they would file a pull request and have this pull request and merged eventually. But at this point in time, most companies get out of the project again. And there is no structure currently, in most cases, to support maintainers, for instance, in a more sustainable way. Because that is what we described earlier as invisible labor as well, where those maintainers are doing a lot of things to maintain the community, to review PRs, to decide also in an Architectural sense, if this feature is going to be useful for the project or not. I mean, that's a lot of work, that's lots of consideration and thinking that needs to go into this. And in most cases, maintainers are doing this in the evening and on the weekend, like besides their job and their child care or whatever, right? And that's something we want to change in the future. We want to sustain this environment in a way that maintainers are getting paid for this unpaid labor. And that's where we think it would be beneficial to have the industry also coming in. And we, as the So on Tech Fund, we have some expertise now in also this connection to the community. So we have this network and we already proved that we can spend ([Time 0:18:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/69d78629-a4b8-435d-9704-58d9ebd56899)) - **Maintenance Is Unsung Hero** - Maintenance work is essential but often overlooked and undervalued in software development. - The analogy of roads and water infrastructure applies well to sustaining digital infrastructure. Transcript: Speaker 2 That's not very surprising. This is also the same case for the open source ecosystem. No, I guess here are the roads and water supply analogy works pretty well again. Keep it running is maybe more important than always building new. ([Time 0:21:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cef37c55-02e3-486d-8e02-9af10cad9374)) - **Complementary Investment Roles** - Investments in trendy AI startups differ fundamentally from funding invisible digital infrastructure. - Even cutting edge fields depend heavily on well-maintained open source foundational components. Transcript: Speaker 3 Well, I think that those are basically two totally different kinds of investment, right? There's investment in companies that are working on things like AI or new projects and trending topics. Generally, of course, we would say it's great that there are more people thinking about the critical and visible infrastructure. So I'd say if you were thinking about we want more actors, we want more investors and more people to say, yeah, it's really important to do the maintenance work that we were just talking About. So alef alpha, I'm sure is very, very exciting. But we are really adamant, I think, about drawing attention to this critical infrastructure that's invisible to the maintenance work that's invisible. And we shouldn't forget that even innovation, like artificial intelligence and all these language models and networks and deep learning, they really rely on a lot of basic components That are open source. ([Time 0:22:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/587a191e-025f-4afa-8e1b-ede0bf08a2fd)) - **Where to Find Fund Information** - Visit sovereigntechfund.de for detailed info, including application guidance and project updates. - Follow the Fund on social platforms like LinkedIn, Mastodon, Twitter/X, and Blue Sky for news and engagement. Transcript: Speaker 3 So definitely go to saverintechfund.de, that's our website and we, or I, definitely personally updated pretty frequently. And so all the latest information is on there. We have a pretty lengthy description of sort of our mission and our values, but also a long page about how to apply. And we're also on LinkedIn, if you want to stay up to date that way, we posted all about the new projects that we're investing in there. Also on the Fediverse, I'm Mastodon at softtechfund at mastodon.social. Still on Twitter slash X. And I think I could also say you could find us on Blue Sky. So we do have an account there as well. ([Time 0:29:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66961b05-5fa1-426e-a02a-348bfd7ff402))