Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund announced it has invested some €23 million in 60 open source projects over the course of the last two years.

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund has the goal of promoting and supporting the development of open source projects, especially those developing “foundational open source technologies.” Two years in, the organization says it has invested in 60 such projects, to the tune of €23 million.

Throughout our second year, the Sovereign Tech Fund identified and invested in even more foundational open source technologies. With nearly 500 submissions proposing over €114 million in work since we started accepting applications, the need for support has never been more clear. By financing critical projects like Log4j, we’re commissioning much-needed maintenance, security work, and improvements in the public interest. The work on these components benefits all the companies, organizations, and individuals who depend on the open technologies that comprise our shared digital infrastructure.

Some of the projects that have received investment include FreeBSD, Mamba, Samba, PHP, GNOME, Reproducible Builds, GFortran, systemd, FFmpeg, GStreamer, Log4j, Drupal, Fortran, and many more.

An important element included improving developer tooling, which will in turn benefit many other projects.

Five teams received approximately €860,000 to working on improving developer tooling, securing software production, and documentation in free and open source (FOSS) projects: conda-store, Haskell Cabal, p5.js documentation, and Open Web Docs.

The Sovereign Tech Fund has been so successful that its funding has been increased going into 2025.

The Sovereign Tech Fund was founded two years ago as a special initiative — the first of its kind — to increase the resilience of the open source ecosystem. This signified a new way of thinking about how the public interest, governments, and digital infrastructure are interconnected. Over the last year, we’ve made much progress towards becoming an independent and permanent organization, working closely with SPRIND and our partners at German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, which funds us.

Last week, the budget committee of the Bundestag decided to increase the Sovereign Tech Fund’s allocation by €4 million for next year. We’re honored and thankful for the German Parliament’s recognition of the importance of open source technologies, and for their continued trust in our work.

Given the importance of open source software, both within the open source community and to the many corporations that rely on it, it’s good to see efforts made to support some of these critical projects.