Our EU headquarters are at http://haiku-support-association.org/index-eng.html
We could use that legal entity there. But, 1) not sure what we’d do exactly with it right now and 2) someone has to do the paperwork and stuff.
From my local point of view here in France the current government seems pretty happy with using Microsoft/Google/IBM things even when there are local alternatives available. So I don’t have high hopes for anything in that area. Maybe it’s different at the EU level or in other countries.
If you look at announcements like this: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/eu-funds-open-source-programm#:~:text=The European Research Council (ERC,security testing and on cryptography.&text=One such grant was awarded,is designed to be safe.
You can see that:
- They have no problem funding Mozilla, which is not EU based
- These grants tend to go to large-ish projects or entities (research labs, universities) where someone has time and motivation to do the paperwork to apply for it.
If you look at https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/open-source-software-strategy_en the current strategy says Open Source gets “equal treatment” with proprietary software. That’s not really as supportive as it sounds. I’d prefer if they said “OpenSource is strongly preferred” instead.
Then there was EU-FOSSA which ended last month: https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/eu-fossa-2_en They tried different things: hosting/funding “hackatons” (coding sprints) for various projects (one of them for the Apache foundation, again something not EU based), a bug bounty program mostly geared towards security and internet infrastructure, etc.
So apparently:
- Having an HQ in the European Union does not seem to make a difference
- What’s needed is someone doing the work to apply to such programs, tell them what we need and why we’d be useful/what we would bring in.
Also, remember that Google and Microsoft are now also Open Source companies and will probably apply for these things as well. So we’ll still be competing against them.