Also
The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside.
Good old AI bubble strikes again.
It’s a justification, they know full well it’s not some future revolution.
But it’s a very good device to hijack discourse and funds.
It seems obvious that people who get to the top are smart, just not in the good way. They know the potential of various technologies. If they don’t understand the subjects themselves, they have hundreds of experts willing to lecture them. Even if they pretend to not have understood a word, in fact they do gain knowledge.
As long as public money -> public code, this could potentially be a net positive for stopping predatory AI practices from Microsoft and buddies. Still, taking away funding from other projects could also be catastrophic for everything else.
If there are any French or Germans in particular reading this please share on your numerous native instances: If you are in the EU you need to contact policy makers (as outlined in the article) about this. I’m sorry I can’t be with you on this one but Brexit.
The beauty of high level corruption is that local peasants can’t do much about it.
Good news is that Germany for example if trying to get away from corpos and use OSS, so at least we know within german government there are people who [see] this issue properly.
Ouf, that’s a rough blow!
