The KDE project announced it has received nearly €1.3 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) for development in 2026 and 2027. The funding is intended to enhance the reliability of the architecture and modernize the technology stack. KDE plans to use the funds to improve the resilience and security of key infrastructure elements, communication services, and products.
It was noted that the allocated funds will help take the project's core products, such as the KDE Plasma desktop environment and the KDE Linux distribution, to a new level, enabling ordinary users, businesses, and government agencies to regain their privacy, security, and control over their digital sovereignty. The GNOME project will also receive one million euros in 2023 and 2024. The STF views the allocation of funds to key desktop environments used in Linux as an investment in the resilience and reliability of the digital infrastructure that underpins modern society.
The STF was established in Germany to foster the development of open digital infrastructure and open-source ecosystems. The fund was created with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection and is overseen by the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND). It is noted that investing in open-source software fosters innovation in Germany and Europe, and improves competitiveness, productivity, and the ability to advance innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises.
In addition to KDE, the following projects received financial support this year:
- Mastodon (614 thousand euros),
- libmicrohttpd3 (234 thousand euros),
- Debian CI (180 thousand euros),
- PHPStan (210 thousand euros),
- OSGi (165 thousand euros),
- Sequoia (225 thousand euros),
- FFmpeg (280 thousand euros).
Since 2022, the STF has invested €37.3 million in 108 open source projects, including FreeBSD, GNOME, Samba, Rust, Pipewire, Eclipse, OpenStreetMap, Arch Linux, and FFmpeg. In addition to the already mentioned KDE and Mastodon, the largest amount of funding has been allocated to:
- GNOME (one million euros),
- Rust (826 thousand euros),
- Samba (688 thousand euros),
- FreeBSD (686 thousand euros),
- Arch Linux (562 thousand euros),
- Servo (545 thousand euros),
- Eclipse (515 thousand euros),
- Maven (450 thousand euros),
- OpenSSL (405 thousand euros),
- systemd (399 thousand euros),
- R Project (392 thousand euros),
- Scala (377 thousand euros),
- PHP (223 thousand euros)
Source: opennet.ru
