EC Projects

Having a strong geographical focus on the European Research Area (ERA) and its neighbours, while being open for collaboration worldwide, the EU Framework Programmes (see section <A.1.1>) can serve as an example for the new funding mechanism. Although the FOSS world is generally an international or even worldwide affair, to be eligible for funding, a FOSS project should have relevance to Europe, for example in its roots or in its developer or user community. For FOSS created or used by European public services this relevance is obvious.

Almost all existing funding mechanisms for FOSS require the resulting source code to be published under an open-source licence "officiallyhttps://opensource.org/faq#avoid-unapproved-licenses recognised as such by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).https://opensource.org/licenses/category While this is a good starting point, we have found that the current open-source licensing landscape is an important factor in the sustainability issues many FOSS projects are experiencing. In Chapter <7> we elaborate on what we identified as one of the root causes of this problem and present several new open-source licensing paradigms, which do not meet OSI's Open Source Definition.

Next to supporting FOSS projects directly, there are many other, more indirect ways to support projects and the ecosystem. We already mentioned torservers.net above.

There are many FOSS projects from within the community itself that aim to help other FOSS projects in sustaining themselves. We have already discussed Open Collective, Code Shelter, FOSS Torrents, Fosshost, Codeberg and EthicalAds (see sections <B.3>, <B.4> and <3.3>), and there are many others.

Foundational software consists of software libraries on which new applications can be built, and the middleware that interconnects applications. This type of software deserves special attention, because it functions as an enabler for software higher in the development stack. Supporting foundational software can function as a multiplier that increases the impact and effectiveness of a funding mechanism.