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1. Embed this notice
   Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 24-Jul-2025 17:05:23 JST Aral Balkan

   The only way Microsoft should be involved in a European Sovereign Tech Fund is if we fund it by taxing the living shit out of them.

   But having them organise and influence it (and who gets funded by it), thereby de facto giving Microsoft EU taxpayer subsidies? Get the fuck out of here.

   There are no words to describe how angry this attempt at corporate capture gets me when we’ve been working on sovereign tech in the EU for the past seven years with zero EU funding (not for lack of trying).

   Note which people and organisations allow their names to be used to legitimise this effort so you don’t trust a thing they say on this subject in the future.

   https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/we-need-a-european-sovereign-tech-fund/

   #EU #FOSS #freedom #tech #funding #EuropeanSovereignTechFund #corporateCapture #openWashing #BigTech #microsoft #GitHub

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 25-Jul-2025 21:33:45 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Walter van Holst
     • Steve Holden

     @whvholst @holdenweb Oh, do tell me about ngi.

     https://ar.al/2022/10/20/nlnet-grant-application-for-domain-rejected/

     (That wasn’t even our last rejection. I just got tired of writing about it.)

   • Embed this notice
     Walter van Holst (whvholst@eupolicy.social)'s status on Friday, 25-Jul-2025 21:33:46 JST Walter van Holst

     in reply to

     • Steve Holden

     @holdenweb @aral You may want to look into NGI Zero https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ which is mostly funded by the EU.

   • Embed this notice
     Steve Holden (holdenweb@freeradical.zone)'s status on Friday, 25-Jul-2025 21:33:47 JST Steve Holden

     in reply to

     @aral the last good thing I remember the EU doing for open source was funding pypy - must have been at least twenty years ago.

     Microsoft need to butt out - too much American influence in tech already.