GitHub Wants the EU to Fund Open Source, But Who Should Really Pay?
GitHub (and by extension its owner, Microsoft) is calling for a new EU tech fund to ensure critical open source software can be maintained.
Its proposal, detailed in a commissioned report, notes that our economies and societies rely on open source software (OSS) in digital infrastructure, but that maintenance ‘continues to be underfunded, especially when compared to physical infrastructure like roads or bridges’
GitHub’s research says 96% of all codebases contain open source code, and OSS contributes an estimated $8.8 trillion to the global economy.
Yet, most open source projects receive little-to-no funding. A third of critical projects (key dependencies in wider efforts) are maintained by just a single person. Others, though better staffed, rely on volunteer contributors and goodwill.
Without sustainable funding and support, it is entirely foreseeable that ever more open source software projects will not receive the diligence and scrutiny appropriate for software of such criticality.
Github’s report
That means a lot of the infrastructure underpinning day-to-day life, fuelling the digital economy, rests on fragile foundations. Without sustainable open source maintenance, key components could fail – or worse, have security issues that affect everything on top.
A Sovereign Tech Fund for Europe
Per GitHub’s report, the solution is to scale up Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to a pan-European level. Regular readers will be familiar with the STF since it has, in recent years, helped finance important initiatives within the GNOME project (Ubuntu uses GNOME, so relevant).
This proposed EU-STF would give cash to widely-used, critical components to help sustain and support open source maintenance.
GitHub’s report recommends a starting budget of €350 million carved out of the bloc’s 2028-2035 budget, and using the money to action 5 key areas:
- Identifying the EU’s most critical open source dependencies
- Investments in maintenance
- Investments in security
- Investments in improvement
- Strengthening the open source ecosystem
The funding would require the creation of a new, centralised EU institution (a ‘moonshot model’), or a group of EU member states willing to provide initial funding and then seek further resources from the EU budget (a ‘pragmatic model’).
As GitHub itself puts it: “The flip side of everybody benefiting from this open digital infrastructure is that too few feel responsible for paying the tab.”
Cold hard cash is the answer, and GitHub thinks the European Union should step in to spend public money to fill in the OSS funding gap.
Others in the Linux community already take a more direct approach.
Canonical is donating £120,000 in 2025 to the smaller open source projects it relies on to maintain the infrastructure, tooling and triage mechanisms in Ubuntu and adjacent projects. The sums are small but symbolic: accepting responsibility to fund the dependencies you use.
The proposed fund wouldn’t be a free-for-all (you couldn’t pitch a desktop widget and expect a wedge of polymer). Rather, it would be strategically directed at the ecosystem’s most critical, underfunded dependencies to make sure maintenance, security, and continued improvement happens.
Funding is Vital – But Who Pays?
Github’s proposed €350 million EU-STF is a sizeable slice of the EU’s budget but “…would not be enough to meet the open source maintenance need”, merely “form the basis for leveraging industry and national government co-financing that would make a lasting impact.”
Yet €350 million is veritable chump change when viewed against the profits that big tech companies—remember those stats from earlier—generate each year.
I don’t disagree with the notion that funding OSS is a vital public good, or that a co-ordinated, centralised and (ideally) transparent funding process is best.
Yet, the cynic inside me is eye-rolling a little. Microsoft, like all of the big tech giants, relies heavily on OSS to ensure its own profits stay ever-inflating. The idea that national governments—taxpayers, effectively—ought o stump up “or else catastrophe” is a little (pardon the pun) rich.
Their vast Scrooge McDuck money pits were dug using labour provided by hundreds of thousands of open source developers.
While open source maintainers deserve monetary support to ensure valuable talent and critical software is rewarded, the existence of an EU fund could be seen by big tech companies as a way to offload their own responsibility.
What’s interesting from its blog post is that GitHub (and Microsoft) is not paying mere lip service to this idea. It’s pushing for it. It plan to EU legislators to advocate for the creation of a fund, and warn politicians of the risks of inaction.
Something has to be done, and an EU Sovereign Tech Fund is one way to address it — but shouldn’t those who milk the community cow for profit stump up most for its feed?
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