The Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/), a subsidiary of Germany's Ministry for Economic affairs, will issue a one million dollar grant to the GNOME foundation (https://www.gnome.org/). Most reports are in German, but OMGUbuntu has a summary at https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/11/gnome-sovereign-tech-fund. The foundation already has supported several open source infrastructure projects, from FORTRAN to cURL, but this is the first time that it directly supports the Linux desktop.
This grant acknowledges GNOME a part of critical infrastructure and therefore worthy of this public support. Most of the spent money will go into improving accessibility, but some points also address security and the general software infrastructure.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by KritonK on Friday December 01, @08:39AM (7 children)
I hope they also give a million dollars each to Cinnamon [wikipedia.org], KDE [wikipedia.org], LXDE [wikipedia.org], LXQt [wikipedia.org], MATE [wikipedia.org], Trinity [wikipedia.org], Xfce [wikipedia.org], and all other alternatives to GNOME.
Unless, of course, the money comes with a few strings attached: do you want a million bucks, or do you want to keep developing that unusable stuff?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Friday December 01, @10:56AM (2 children)
I'm pretty confident that there would be strings attached to that money and that's (almost) fine. Those levels of money only very, very rarely come without strings of any sorts attached.
Open Source is not about supporting every competing alternative to a particular component in equal ways, it's about offering you the ability to do things with the software and its source that you would otherwise not be able to. There's nothing in there that says "now do the same for the other ones as well". And so what I don't understand is why you imply that they should also give an (equal) amount of money to those other projects. You may not like GNOME, and that's totally fine, don't use it; but if you are indeed asking for what it appears that you're asking for, then be very careful, because next time someone gives money to a GNOME alternative, people will be asking for the same thing that you seem to be advocating here for as well (namely: if you give to GNOME, give to the others as well). The end result of that will not be that more projects will get more money, but rather that no projects will get any money. And that would be an impoverishment for everyone, including your favorite project(s).
Be careful what you're advocating for...
Can you elaborate on whether that was your intended signal and if so, why that would be required?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Sunday December 03, @01:05PM (1 child)
Picking the most unusable desktop environment and funding its development, calling it critical infrastructure, sounds utterly bizarre to me. It they consider "Linux on the desktop", not GNOME, to be the critical infrastructure (perhaps in the sense of ensuring there is an alternative to Windows), then they should at least fund one of the usable alternatives as well, or fund only that, if they only have that single million to spend.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 03, @03:03PM
If they use Gnome then that is what they should be supporting. Why should they support POP_OS or KDE just because you think that they are better than the OS that they have chosen?
I accept that you do not like it - that is fine and I have no issue with that. I still use MATE which is based on Gnome2 because it does exactly what I want it to do, it is easily configurable, and as the saying goes 'it just works'. Would you be insisting that I give financial support to another OS just because you prefer it to the one that I have chosen?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday December 01, @04:14PM (3 children)
I don't know. As much fun as KDE et.al. are, they seem to be much more focused more on the high-functionality tweak-happy "geek market" (well, maybe not Cinnamon so much, but they're a minor player). For the typical "computer dumbass" home or office user, Gnome is pretty much where it's at, which is reflected in its near total domination of the major commercial distributions.
Frankly, even as an avid geek I'd be rather offended at my government spending public money on developing geek toys that will only ever be relevant to our tiny demographic.
And as a Linux geek, I'd much rather public funds be focused on bringing the dominant mainstream desktop to parity with Windows for Joe Sixpack. We can start worrying about alternative desktops once the Windows stranglehold is broken.
Breaking that stranglehold is something well worth spending public funds on. Germany tried to push the switch to Linux in government offices once already, and it didn't go so great. I assume the purpose of this sort of investment is to get things into a more promising state for another push in the future.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday December 01, @05:03PM
I disagree. Joe Sixpack is never going to be tempted off of Windows. It's a lost cause. Public money should be used for innovation and pushing the envelope, not aspiring to the mediocrity of the mainstream like Microsoft. Joe Sixpack will use something else when that something else comes installed with the laptop he just bought and runs his first person shooter.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 02, @05:01PM
I'd much rather public funds be focused on bringing the dominant mainstream desktop to parity with Windows for Joe Sixpack.
Spoken like someone who has never used Linux. Cinnamon Mint is easier to install and set up than Windows is to set up when pre-installed on a new computer. Adding apps is no different than your phone. Perhaps the Ernie Ball corporation (who IMO make the best guitar strings) might might change your mind. [cnet.com]
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday December 03, @12:13AM
I find there is a vast chasm between the two in terms of configuration and customisation. Gnome is like windows, maybe you can change a dark or light theme. You need to install gnome-tweaks to change anything useful. But KDE is hyper customisable, too much in fact that I’ve spent hours trying to get a nice theme combination working and decluttering the UI. That’s what I don’t like about both of them. In the past I’ve mostly spent my time with KDE. I’ve found it to be most useful and out of my way.
The main reason I can pretty much only use KDE these days is because I have a 28” 4K monitor and it seems like scaling for hidpi is, after years of such displays being mainstream, a sore and underdeveloped point for Linux. But mostly gnome, it’s barely usable because my default it gives you only 100% or 200% to choose between, but you can enable fractional scaling, but this seems to Bork everything because then applications like Firefox and Thunderbird are blurry. You don’t seem to get this with KDE so I think I have to stick with them for the time being.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday December 01, @09:58AM
Nice though this is, I feel that FLOSS projects in general ought to get more EU-funding (rather than just German-funding) than they currently do. It's the best way for the EU to get viable other choices than the current oligopoly.
From an IT/security point of view, being dependant on a whole operating system and associated applications produced outside the EU for desktops, and a userland and 'app' store produced outside the EU for mobile phones is hardly a wonderful strategy.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 01, @11:54AM (2 children)
What on earth will they do with that many deer?
P.S.: Editors, while I appreciate your work, please stick to proper language...
(Score: 4, Funny) by pTamok on Friday December 01, @12:26PM
＜Homer_Simpson＞ Doe! ＜/Homer_Simpson＞
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 02, @05:07PM
The term "buck" has been synonymous for "dollar" for centuries, Karen.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Funny) by EJ on Friday December 01, @01:36PM
Phase 1: Collect underpants
Phase 2: RECEIVE $1m from Germany!
Phase 3: Profit
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Friday December 01, @01:52PM (5 children)
Submitter here. A few notes:
- I chose the slightly clickbaity and sensationalist headline (and submitted the article in the first place), because this is really unheard of: A national entity pours a significant (for actual working people) amount into the Linux desktop proper.
- It's a million Euros, not Dollars. I must have been confused by my own sensationalist headline. ;)
- I don't like GNOME and the clique behind it, but they still lord over GTK, which makes them unavoidable. I'd much more like to see MATE and Cinnamon improved.
- Most of the work is for accessibility, which wouldn't be such a big issue (and require that much money to fix) hadn't they fucked up their stuff since GNOME 3.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 01, @03:54PM (4 children)
Also a million isn't really what it used to be, or it's the same but what you get for it has really changed. Dollars or Euro doesn't really matter all that much here. At best this will cover the work of about, or less than, a handful of people for a year or so at best. Still it's nice that they are getting grants. But I don't think it's a long term or big and lasting solution.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 01, @04:21PM
"Isn't what it used to be" is correct.
Money is an abstract social fiction agreed upon as an intermediate medium of exchange - it has no innate value of its own. Its value is measured entirely in what real value (bread, property, services, etc.) people are willing to exchange for it at the moment.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday December 01, @04:34PM (1 child)
I guess it depends a bit on where you spend the million. If you've seen the Mozilla foundation offices, it would not go far there. Or in general, if you have to pay salaries somewhere in California. However, in Germany, like if they treated it a bit as a local subsidy, you could keep your handful of people for over two years. More in eastern Europe, or looking a the "few-thousand-dollar bounties" that some projects on smaller budgets offer, it would go a long way. I suspect though, that spending the money there would be a waste, because the GNOME clique doesn't really collaborate. (E.g. from mobbing out the original author of Glade to the recent statements about removing GTK4 features needed by other environments, essentially "we don't give a fuck about them").
Germany probably has the most programmers in the world dedicated to the cause, so the resources would be there to just fork off, write DIN norms about how it is supposed to be and then insist for compliance on public procurements. And two years later insist on compliance for everyone who wants to communicate with official places, "viruses, and ransomware, and that stuff, we don't want that...". I suspect a good number of countries would follow. Everyone who wanted to sell software in Germany would have not only have to adapt (WINE could make it a bit easier for them), but also face the Apple-store like wrath of the curating agency keeping crap out. However, someone would have to lead such a project and that absolutely wouldn't be anyone with the slightest clue. Also, the powers in charge have very vested interests to prevent such a development, so I give it no chance.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Friday December 01, @05:01PM
The evolution of GNOME is a mystery. It was very impressive at first, Sun did some paid work on it, accessibility got improved and then after a few years the GNOME people seemed intent on dumbing it down. They removed all sorts of functionality and configurability. Strange changes were made to Gtk.
A few months ago I was thinking about writing a GUI program and I looked around at the state of things in the FOSS world. I was shocked at the direction Gtk had taken. I decided not to bother writing that GUI application until I could write my own GUI stuff too. I'm not using any of the rubbish that's about these days.
I don't use a desktop environment on my own systems. Window Maker does everything I want. I don't need all the desktop-environment-specific applications and utilities. My system has the KDE libraries installed and I will run the odd KDE application if I really need to but I very rarely do.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 02, @05:10PM
Yes it is, just that Elon has more of it than ever and you and I have less of it than ever. Inflation doesn't make money disappear, except from the buyer's hand to the seller's hand. It didn't disappear, it went into stockholders' bank accounts.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 01, @05:18PM (3 children)
That'll just encourage them to continue fucking with gtk.
Because of their hard work on breaking things, a significant fraction of my mental effort* is spent on "is there a scrollbar here?" and "where is the scrollbar?", ahead of "what is the writer trying to get across" or "why is that *all* the poster said?"
* not a majority, but not a percentage, either
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday December 01, @08:46PM (2 children)
It's ludicrous, isn't it?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Saturday December 02, @05:15PM (1 child)
That's why I record the radio in Audacity on a Linux Mint computer (Windows won't let you any more) and edit the files in Audacity on the Windows computer; the scroll bar is FUBAR and completely unusable on the Linux version of Audacity.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday December 02, @05:36PM
It's time to start again from scratch, isn't it?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].