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Painful day for tech titans as EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into them
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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It would be amazing if even a small portion of EU fines for big tech companies went to supporting open source alternatives.
In the Linux world, we are seeing right now how much things like Valve putting a bit of money into Linux, Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund giving €1m to the Gnome foundation, etc, is improving things massively. Funding helps. Developers/designers/etc like being paid.
Imagine if even 1% of these big tech fines went into a pot that an independent body chooses open projects to invest in. It'd be huge.
Open source has a sustainability problem in terms of funding, developers, and burnout. To me it seems we have a relatively easy and politically palatable solution.
The EU spends plenty of grant money on FLOSS. It's part of the general Horizon grants, there's a bug bounty programme (as replacement for the hackatons which didn't work as well as imagined), and last but not least the EU publishes lots of software as FLOSS.
You don't want to make that stuff contingent on big tech misbehaving. The fines go into the general EU budget but the EU doesn't get to keep it, membership fees are lowered in the next year by the same amount thus the windfall goes to member state's budgets.