XSF Communications Team - 2022-09-16

Licaon_Kter: Good news!

But is it though?

More money in xmpp freedomware and if we're lucky more features in an xmpp client. Seems all good?

Too good to be true, what's next, group video calls cross platform? Madness :))

Many good things in the XMPP ecosystem in recent years are thanks to NLnet funding. I've no reason to doubt it's true :)

What NLnet lacks, or better said, what EU lacks (atm) is long term funding, as this spot funds help of course, but the project should be alive and maintained next year too. (No, not stickers but updates, fixes, polish, etc)

Yes. If more projects were ready to raise that kind of funds there might be more options to try to get them, but it's a hard problem in both sides a bit for sure

Licaon_Kter, can't say I disagree with that. For example, the stuff I'm working on that they funded is stuff that needed to be done, but probably wouldn't have been my priority. But it's much harder to get funding for bug fixes and polish than for new features (especially related to security!).

It's not that what I'm doing isn't important, just that it probably wouldn't have been by #1 priority

or I would have done it in smaller steps, interleaved with other stuff

EU has all those digital commons programms, public money public code stuff, interoperability or wants to have whatever, so stuff like this (xmpp) should be treated as infrastructure instead.

Grant programs are just already understood I think, since the same happens for arts etc

Long term funding sounds more like being an employee or like basic income

Not sure how many of NLnet are still around and used/maintained, eg. OpenPush is dead

IMO if one is going to do grants one needs to inject to an already healthy project or something that seems like it has at least a solid plan to become so. It's like an investment where the return is the project improving