Written by
The XWiki Team
The support of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs has been crucial to the development of our open-source products, XWiki and CryptPad, in a highly competitive market largely financed by venture capital investments.
The XWiki SAS and CryptPad development teams support this open letter originally published by the petites singularités in favor of the NGI programs. You can support this effort by publishing the official letter on your website and by adding yourself, your organization or project in the table found at the end of the official letter page.
Open letter to the European Commission
Since 2020, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs, a sub-branch of the European Commission's Horizon Europe program, have been cascading funding (via NLNet calls) for open-source software in Europe. This year, on reading the draft "Horizon Europe work programmes" detailing the European Commission's funding programs for 2025, we noticed that the Next Generation Internet programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4.
The NGI programs have demonstrated their strength and importance in supporting Europe's software infrastructure, creating a generic instrument for funding digital commons that must be made accessible over the long term. We find this change incomprehensible, all the more so as NGI operates efficiently and cost-effectively, supporting all open-source projects, from the smallest initiatives to the most well-established. The diversity of this ecosystem represents the great strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support for these software projects, which are at the heart of global innovation, ensures the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and more often than not from small-scale structures.
Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:
- "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe" ;
- "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life" ;
- "A structured ecosystem of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet common".
Over 500 projects have received NGI0 funding in the first 5 years of operation, and more than 18 organizations are involved in bringing these European consortia to life.
NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, since most of the budget is devoted to funding third parties through open calls, which structure common projects covering the entire Internet scope, from hardware and vertical integration applications to virtualization, protocols, operating systems, electronic identities and data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects without adequate resources for research and innovation in Europe.
What's more, NGI enables exchanges and collaborations across all the countries in the eurozone, as well as with widening countries1, which is both a success story and a work in progress, as was the Erasmus program before us. NGI0 is also an initiative that contributes to opening up and maintaining relationships over a longer period than project financing. NGI also encourages the implementation of funded projects through pilots, and supports collaboration within initiatives, as well as the identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability especially of identification systems, and the establishment of development models integrating other sources of funding at different scales across Europe.
At a time when the USA, China and Russia are deploying colossal public and private resources to develop software and infrastructures that massively capture consumer data, the European Union cannot afford to give up. Free and open-source software, as supported by the NGI projects since 2020, is, by design, the opposite of a potential vector for foreign interference. They enable data to be stored locally, and promote a community-based economy and know-how, while at the same time enabling international collaboration. This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context. The challenge of technological sovereignty is paramount, and free software is the answer, without neglecting the need to work for peace and citizenship throughout the digital world.
With this in mind, we urge you to call for the preservation of the NGI program in the 2025 funding program.
- ^ As defined by Horizon Europe, the widening Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Widening associated states (subject to an association agreement): Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Faroe Islands, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldavia, Montenegro, Morocco, Northern Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The widening outermost regions are: Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Reunion, Mayotte, Saint-Martin, the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands.
