Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects.
Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects.
thelibre.news
Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/28204065
45 comments
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This really sucks. I honestly didn't know the Feds gave so much money to FOSS, but I looked up the USAGM and that makes sense.
It tracks with current trends. Basically anything that could be interpreted as benefiting any county other than the United States or any demographic other than rich white men is getting funding cut. What an embarrassment.
At a time when decentralizing information is critical, our tools to do so are also threatened.
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Fortunately, those projects still exist and we all have an opportunity to financially support them.
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Yet another instance of Trump being too small to understand soft power.
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That 4 miles long military parade for his 79th birthday doesn't pay by itself, unfortunately 😢
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Have you even said thank you once
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Let's put some numbers on all of this. The OTF's total budget slowly raised from ~$10M in 2019 to a grand total of $40M in 2023, almost half of all allocated funds by Congress to promote Internet freedom globally.
That's an incredibly tiny amount of money.
More recently, Congress had directed that - for both the fiscal years of 2024 and 2025 - the funding should be "not less than $43,500,000", which guaranteed an income stream for 2025 too.
Looks like some spicy legal action will suck up a lot of those cuts...
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I also like to measure in jetwing money ... This is like half a jetwing.
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I like to estimate by cost per congressperson, which is ~$7.5M/year. So the whole of OTF is about 3 congresspeople (and their staff), that sounds fair.
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He has angered the penguins
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What languages and patterns will be considered woke?
For sure memory safety and dependent types. C++ will probably be shoved down our throats.
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Rust
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COBOL.
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Have you donated to your favorite foss projects this week?
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Why would he fund communism in the first place? (/s before you try to hit me with that downvote button).
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Sorry, downvoted anyway.
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The problem is, European leaders are sacks of shit too. They don't care either.
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Although they could do more, I wouldn't say they don't care. For instance, Germany established the Sovereign Tech Agency.
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I know it's only vaguely related, since they're not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers' funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn't funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of "fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies" elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.
Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.
Surely.
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Im not saying Zuck is good or a savior of choice, but now would be a good time for facebook investors to pressure him to eat that difference.
Not that he should, but hes been all in on Open Source* lately
*Massive stipulations apply.
45 comments
Relevant to !selfhosted because one of the projects getting funding cut is Let's Encrypt.
Let's Encrypt has done so much for encouraging the spread of HTTPS and good certificate practices. If they went away, I honestly think a good chunk of the internet would start breaking after ~6 months.
Less HTTPS = easier government & advertiser data collection
At least there's some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let's Encrypt were to disappear.
I suspect the vast majority of certificate authorities will implement the ACME protocol eventually, since the industry as a whole is moving towards certificates with shorter expiry times, meaning that automation will essentially be mandatory unless you like manually updating certs every 90-180 days.
It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?
Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.
The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.
But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.
I'm gonna have to donate then.
Same. I've been thinking about who to donate to this year, and it looks like they're making the cut. I'll probably also throw some money at my Lemmy instance and a handful of projects I use, including Tor, because apparently they got caught in the dragnet too.
Every day just gets worse doesn't it.