The European Union must keep funding free software

This is an open letter initially published in French by the Petites Singularités association. To co-sign it, please publish it on your website in your preferred language, then add yourself to this table.

Since 2020, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) program, part of European Commission’s Horizon program, funded free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet’s calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programs for 2025, we noticed the Next Generation Internet is not mentioned as part of Cluster 4.

NGI programs have demonstrated their strength and importance in supporting the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and ecomomical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation. Maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:

  • “Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe”
  • “A flourishing Internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life”
  • “A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new Internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons”

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI0 funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.

NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope—from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities, or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.

Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the EU zone, as well as “widening countries”1, currently both a success and an ongoing progress, like the Erasmus program before us. NGI0 also contributes to opening and maintaining longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages the implementation of funded projects through pilots and supports collaboration within intiatives, as well as the identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and the establishment of development models that integrate other sources of financings at different scales in Europe.

While the USA, China, or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can’t afford this renunciation. Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration. This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central and free software makes it possible to respond to it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.

In this perpective, we urgently ask you to call for the preservation of the NGI program in the 2025 funding program.

1 As defined by Horizon Europe, widening Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lituania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Widening associated countries (under condition of an association agreement) include Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Feroe Islands, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldavia, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkeye, and Ukraine. Widening overseas regions are Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique, Reunion Island, Mayotte, Saint-Martin, The Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands. ↩︎