GitHub has come out in favor of a Sovereign Tech Fund. Such a funding model is also used by the Sovereign Tech Agency.

Felix Reda writes in »We need a European Sovereign Tech Fund« on github.blog:

There is a profound mismatch between the importance of open source maintenance and the public attention it receives. The demand-side value of open source software to the global economy is estimated at $8.8 trillion, and the European Commission’s own research shows that OSS contributes a minimum of €65-95 billion to the EU economy annually. Basic open source technologies, such as libraries, programming languages, or software development tools, are used in all sectors of the economy, society, and public administrations.

I reproduced the following table because I found the numbers interesting.

Open source is everywhereOpen source is valuableOpen source is underfinanced
96% of all code bases contain OSS$8.8T demand-side value to global economy1/3 of OSS maintainers are unpaid
77% of a given code base is OSS€65-95M minimum contribution to annual EU GDP1/3 are the only maintainer of their OSS project

GitHub cites a study that they commissioned themselves.

The text was automatically translated from German into English. The German quotations were also translated in sense.