Welcome to "The Open Source Way". This is our podcast series, SAP's podcast series, about the difference that open source can be. And in each episode, we'll talk with experts about open source and why they do it the open-source way. I'm your host, Karsten Hohage, and in this episode, I'm going to talk to Powen Shiah and Mirko Swillus about the Sovereign Tech Fund. Hi, Mirko. Hi, Powen. Nice to have you here.
Hi. Thanks for having us.
Hi.
All right, let's look at who these guys are. Powen handles the communications at Sovereign Tech Fund. His background is marketing, internationalization, and things like that in startups in Germany and the United States. Mirko, on the other hand, has a 15-years of professional experience in software engineering. He worked at different setups and roles . At the Sovereign Tech Fund Mirko works on the full lifecycle of technologies and projects.
From reviewing the applications that apply through contracting, to successfully finishing the projects that derive from that . Mirko, another thing you told me before is: You are currently learning Rust. Is that right?
That's correct. Yes.
And as we've had a session about that in July '21, I happen to have heard some things about it. Do you also feel that the Rust compiler, when compared to other compilers, is like very, very strict, like a sergeant major in the Army or something, that constantly yells at you for doing things wrong?
Actually, I think it's helpful. So, I have a little bit of a background with Java and a tiny little bit of Python as well. But I think the language, when you learn it coming from that direction, it's a little bit challenging here and there, but I can understand where the concepts are coming from and the paradigms. And so, I think also the compiler is actually helpful.
But that was, in the end, the result that we had in that discussion as well. But the colleague said it is much more strict. And then of course, through that, more helpful than some other compilers.
Yeah, I would agree.
Okay. All right. Powen, what are you up to these days?
I'm getting ready for Thanksgiving. So, I live in Berlin and have some other American friends here that I'm going to be celebrating with this weekend. So, thinking about baking cornbread or maybe some green beans or mashed potatoes, that kind of stuff.
Okay, do you get all the ingredients, like, sweet potatoes and lots of pumpkin for pumpkin pie and so on.
Yeah, I actually just came back from the US, and I brought some canned pumpkin with me for the pumpkin pie. And my friend who is baking the pie was very grateful. But you can sometimes find it in Germany, so it's all good.
Okay, but let's get to the topic: the Sovereign Tech Fund, the STF. What is that?
Yeah, thanks for asking. The Sovereign Tech Fund was set up just about a year ago in 2022, to support the open-source ecosystem. We focus on critical infrastructure in the public interest, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about what that means exactly. And we are supported by the German government. So, the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action wants to safeguard, basically, the essential components that are needed for economic growth and innovation.
So, does that mean you're direct employees of Robert Habeck, or not quite directly?
Not quite directly. So, we actually, in the first year, were hosted and built up by SPRIND, which is a government owned corporation called the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. It's located in Leipzig. And we just announced, this week, that we will be spinning out as a subsidiary. So, we'll be an independent entity, you know, at some point in the next coming months. We're working on that.
Sounds good. And then it's a fund, it's a government supported fund, to, as you said, support open-source projects. What kind of projects in a little more detail would be funded by it?
So, we fund a broad range of what we call, digital infrastructure technologies. All open source. Some examples, we have a whole list on our website, but if you've heard of Curl or OpenMLS . We've invested in Pendulum, which is implementing memory safe NTP and PTP. The language Fortran, which is experiencing a revival. Sequoia PGP, we're doing some stuff with Rusty SBOMs, which is a CycloneDX module for Rust. Those are the kinds of things that we work on.
Okay. Fortran, isn't that like from ages ago and comes right above Assembler or something? I guess that's more one for you, Mirko.
Yeah. Fortran, interestingly enough, is used by a lot of applications that use a lot of numeric calculations. And that is, for instance, like climate modeling or as a modeling in that field. And as you can imagine, a language that is that old, like Fortran, has not the developer experience that you would expect from other more modern languages. And that's specifically one field where we support the Fortran community.
Okay. And another example, what I haven't heard of, is Curl. What would that be about?
So, Curl is like a Swiss army knife for downloading data from the internet. So, it's a little, like, command line tool . But it's not only http, it's also like a lot of other protocols, and it's running also on a huge amount of platforms. So, it's basically built in everywhere, you can expect.
Okay. And these, you have identified from the Sovereign Tech Fund side as being of public interest.
Yes. From our understanding or from our perspective, those components that are building the foundations for a lot of applications. Are building also the foundation for our society, that is more and more becoming digitized and digital. And those components are the foundation, as I said.
Okay, Fortran, many people who at least are above a certain age have heard about, I don't know about Curl or Rusty SBOMs and the other examples you gave . The Corona Warning App or something like the Gaia-X infrastructure , they wouldn't fall under your funding candidates?
Yeah. So, we try to focus on really the infrastructural elements here. So, not so much user facing applications or like products, that you would see more as products or something like that. So, it's really more about the infrastructure, like the building bricks that build our, like, digital environment so to say.
So, it's more the invisible little wheels that nobody notices until they fail, and then we notice how important they really are?
Yeah. That's correct. So, the invisibility is really an interesting point here. So, because it's not only that those building bricks are invisible, but it's also like the labor or the work that people do, in order to maintain those building bricks, is invisible.
I mean you probably can't make them much more visible, but you can at least give them some funding to drive their projects further. Or do you also deal with the visibility of things?
We try to do both, actually. So, we do invest in these, like, we make sure that a lot of these, if they even do get corporate funding, it's often for new features and for development of additional stuff. And from our perspective, we think a lot about maintenance . Like Mirko was saying, about the invisible labor that goes in the everyday stuff that has to be taken care of to keep a component or a library or a framework sort of working for everybody that wants to use it.
And since I'm on the communications side, we also do try to highlight that the stuff exists. If you went to a politician or even to someone you know, one of your friends and said: Do you know there's this like little piece of code, or this library, this framework that's like in every single phone in the world, and also, it's been sent to Mars? That's Curl, you know. People will be like: Oh no, I had no idea, let me look at this app
. And you're like: Oh, it's not an app, actually, it's like a piece of code that helps your phone communicate with, you know, a server somewhere, or it downloads things from the internet. And so that's stuff that we are happy to explain. And I'm, you know, making it my mission to explain it a little better. First to understand, of course, and then to explain it to everyone out there that is not a developer, which I am not.
Yeah. And maybe also in addition to that, we also look at projects where we and our funding can make a difference. So, when you look at Gaia-X, for instance, there's lots of funders in that area as well. But for the components we spoke about earlier, that might not be the case.
Okay, I think I see the difference. And by the way, Powen, when you just said Curl was even sent to Mars, I was envisioning this public relations video of Carl Lee on Mars. Anyway, never mind my stupid ideas here. H ow do these projects get to the Sovereign Tech Funds pots of gold, that you have to give away. Do you like actively hunt for them, or do they apply?
So, as with most such things, it's a little bit of both. We do both outreach and we do also accept applications. We have technologists on our team who are familiar with the Foss landscape. Who have worked with this free and open-source software in the past and are reaching out, sort of researching projects, talking to the experts in our network.
So, we do sort of proactively go out there and find new technologies that need our support and that do fit the criteria that we have around public interest and serving vulnerable people, or that are threatened by market consolidation or dependencies.
Yeah, and the other way. Also, we are taking applications on our website. So, that is a little bit depending on our budget situation. So, when this podcast is going to be published that might be different. But for now, we're taking applications. It's " apply .sovereigntechfund.de" and there you have to fill out a form with a lot of questions that we'd like to dig deeper
into. And then we have a team that is going to review those applications and then compare it to our criteria, what we described earlier: is it critical, is it public interest and so on. And then we decide if we want to go forward with an application into the next stage. That is then trying to understand, like, if the scope of the project is well defined, or if we need to tweak this a little bit and then in the end, we are going to do a contract.
Okay. So, you are doing a contract. So, there are duties connected to making a contract with you.
Yeah so, you can compare it to a common or like a normal service contract that you would also do between customers and service agencies or something like that, where a customer needs to have something implemented. And that's the same case for us as well. With the difference that in our case the customer is the public, right? It's the German government that is acting as a customer here. And that the deliverables are also open source in the end, of course, right? So, because that's our mission.
Okay so, everyone, two things from that: Sovereign Tech Fund is currently still accepting applications . But it's not money for free and play the guitar on the MTV or whatever. It is connected to specific requirements that you will face. Let me drill down on applications a bit more. What are some of the preconditions or the properties of a project that it should bring to be likely to receive funding?
So, the basics are that, you know, it needs to be in a language that we understand. So, we accept applications in English and in German. I t's great if you have some proposed activities that would be covered by the investment or the money that you are asking for from us. So, an idea of sort of what the next steps are, what you want to work on, ideally sort of set up with the community, that you're working with. Of course, it needs to be free or open-source software.
So, we do not hold, for example, you know, the IP or anything like that once you're done. Like that does go back, it needs to be under an open-source license. And for example, at the moment we're not really looking at, as we talked about before, user facing applications or sort of greenfield or prototypes or things like that. And what makes us unique, is that we actually also invest in maintenance and updates, security updates.
So, if you're looking at corporate funders, we know it's not that frequent that they say: Hey, take some time, refactor, figure out what's going on; and, you know, invest in the community or the tooling of your project. And those are things that we do value.
Yeah.
And if you're really interested in looking in the details, of course, the list of criteria is on our website. We try to be as transparent as possible. We'll put the link in the show notes, I think.
Yep, as usual, we will have all the relevant links in the show notes. Anything else people should have ready when they apply? Driver's license, banking information, or something that one might not think of.
What would be a beneficial or helpful is, if the applicant is also referring to, or coming from a fiscal host, or has a fiscal host in the back of their minds already. That helps, of course. Because we need someone in the end who is going to be able to issue an invoice, that is acceptable by German tax law and so on. So, that's definitely something we need to have to process this kind of contract.
Okay, do you offer, if people are not familiar with a term like we require a fiscal host, do you have information on that on your website or offer any type of coaching on that or something?
So, we will support applicants also with finding fiscal hosts. But in the most cases, people also already have something in the back of their minds as well.
Okay. Now, we've talked about some of this under the precondition of public interest. How far does that, frequently maybe, overlap with market interest, with corporate interest ? With let's say, for example, SAP's interest?
Yeah, I think there is this one paper, I think it's from the Ford Foundation some years back - i t's called " Roads and Bridges". Who did a little bit of research in the whole area of underfunded open-source ecosystems. And they're, coming from that title: "Roads and bridges", there is this analogy where you would have public infrastructure, that is roads and bridges. And that infrastructure would be used, not only by corporates but also by citizens of the society, right
? And that is pretty much also in the sense of what we understand as public interest. So, it's not only the public owned health application or something that is government technology for administrations or something like that. Of course, open-source components are also used by companies, by startups a lot. So, in most of the cases it's the driver for innovation and for velocity.
So, especially when you compare it to, I don't know, 20 years back, 25 years back, when you as a startup want to build a new innovative product, then you would have to write most of the things from scratch. Today, software engineering is a lot about composing components, right? And those components are, in 90% or something, are from the open-source ecosystem.
So, from our perspective, this whole innovation process, this whole process how startups build products; this is public interest because it drives our society, it drives our economy. And that's what we define as public interest.
Okay. And the corporate interest in that. Powen, do you want to add to that maybe?
So, I think that there's actually a corporate interest in all of this. So, if we look at other examples of things that happen in the public interest . We talked about roads and bridges, as Mirko said, but we also think about things like education or, you know, water, sewage, electricity networks, train tracks, or even just like the environment in general, the fact that there's clean air and water
. Those are all things that corporations, private actors, individuals, but also the public broadly benefit from when they work. When people are well educated, you know; when they can drink water from the faucet; or when there's, you know, infrastructure like train tracks that you can use to run trains on, or run night trains, or whatever the newest thing is that's happening. And so, that's how we see why there's a corporate interest also in supporting open source.
Because in addition to the things that they directly use, like Mirko was explaining, and I'm sure at SAP, there's a lot of things that are, you know, we can spend this whole podcast talking about the great things that SAP is doing in open source. You're using those components directly
. But there's also an interest in maintaining and making sure that generally those building blocks, we talked about, the software components, the libraries and the frameworks that underlie everything are also well maintained . Because if they don't, then corporations will not be able to innovate as quickly, will not be able to build their new products as easily, or maintain or update their things.
I do like the "roads and water and so on"-analogy because, obviously, we also - as SAP or other corporate players - ride on that public infrastructure in general. So, I like the analogy of that one. Does that mean though, that the corporate world is involved in a; are we just like another entity, or are we involved in a particular way, or plan to be involved in a particular way. Like, do we get a say in who gets funding?
Or other way around, a re you looking for corporate money to add to the funding?
So, we're definitely looking into ways how to extend our budget. So that's, I think not very surprising here. And yeah, especially for 2024 we have some ideas around that. So as we said in the beginning, we just became an own, like, standalone legal entity that would make things a little bit easier on that end as well. And yeah, we want to create this or increase this kind of awareness towards the corporate world, towards the industry as well.
To invite people to, yeah, fund open source, the open-source ecosystem in a more sustainable way as well. So, we know that the industry is doing a lot in terms of contributing to open-source projects. But from our perspective, and this is mostly, having a very specific interest or a very specific project that they want to do, r ight? They have some requirements in a technical sense that needs to be implemented. And they want to have this in the repository, so that they can consume it from there.
So, they would file a pull request and have this pull request then merged eventually. But at this point in time, most companies get out of the project again. And there is no structure currently, in most cases, to support maintainers, for instance, in a more sustainable way. Because that is what we described earlier as invisible labor as well.
Where those maintainers are doing a lot of things to maintain the community, to review PRS, to decide a lso in an architectural sense if this feature is going to be useful for the project or not. I mean that's a lot of work, t hat's lots of consideration and thinking that needs to go into this. And in most cases, maintainers are doing this in the evening and on the weekend, like, besides their job and their childcare or whatever, right? So, and that's something we want to change in the future.
We want to sustain this environment in a way that maintainers are getting paid for this unpaid labor. And that's where we think it would be beneficial to have the industry also coming in. And we as the Sovereign Tech Fund, we have some expertise now in, also this connection to the community. So, we have this network and we already proved that we can, you know, spend money in a meaningful way. So, we would like to invite the industry as well to increase their investment there.
You know, I guess what you said about maintenance is not even particular to the open-source world. I think maintenance is never the sexy part of software development. It kind of lacks the "look what I made"-part.
Now, that's an interesting point, Karsten, actually . Because that's something also we see in the engineering world in general, right? That lots of effort needs to go in that part of the software project where you need to keep the lights on.
And interestingly enough for, most of the time, for the management, this is surprising that we are not doing features all the time and that we are not just investing in adding these new features, but it's most of our energy or a big part of our energy and effort is going to in maintenance. And that's not very surprising. This is also the same case for the open-source ecosystem.
No, I guess here the "roads and water supply"-analogy works pretty well a gain - keep it running is maybe more important than always building new. But another question, because it was in the news a couple of weeks, months ago, the half a billion of corporate money going into Aleph Alpha: T hings like that, which I guess you don't have anything to do with, that's nice but does it increase also awareness of corporate money that should be there to fund things that might be in a broader interest?
Or does it rather take away money that could have potentially gone into the unsexy, invisible, smaller nuts and bolts that the Sovereign Tech Fund is funding?
Well, I think that those are basically two totally different kinds of investment, right? Like there's investment in companies that are working on things like AI or new projects in trending topics. Generally of course, you would say it's great that there are more people thinking about this critical and visible infrastructure.
So I'd say, you know, if you are thinking about , you know, we want more actors, we want more investors and more people to say: Yeah, it's really important to do the maintenance work, that we were just talking about. And so, Aleph Alpha, I'm sure is very, very exciting. But we are really adamant, I think, about drawing attention to this critical infrastructure that's invisible, to the maintenance work that's invisible.
And we shouldn't forget that even innovation, like artificial intelligence and all these language models and neural networks and deep learning, they really rely on a lot of basic components that are open source. And so even that stuff, which is super cool and cutting edge, also needs the things that we're focusing on in order to continue to work properly.
Okay. I think now that we've addressed it from two or three different angles it has hopefully become clearer what the things are - the little bits and pieces - that keep everything together, that you're looking for and that you're funding. Anything else we should discuss in the context?
Yeah, I would be interested as we speak a nd, you know, those insights from the industry are also very much interesting for us as as well as the Sovereign Tech Fund, which is more from the public side, r ight ? How does SAP, as a large German software vendor, maybe even the largest European software vendor or something like that, think about their activity in open source. What do you think how it could be increased?
Okay, now let me start like that: I'm the podcast guy, so I have no entitlement to speak about any financial involvement or whatsoever of SAP as a company, or any very forward-looking things about our open-source strategy. For all I know, SAP doesn't directly finance any open-source projects . But we do provide a lot of financial support to the foundations in that space.
Like the Linux Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, etc., etc.. A lso, SAP has a huge number of open-source projects where we are the main maintainers . Also from contributions that are associated with SAP or SAP employees on the OCI index. W e always are found among the top ten. We also publish that kind of information, of course. T here is a complete list of foundation memberships, that SAP has, that is published on our open-source community pages.
They are always posted underneath this podcast as well. A nd finally, we also release a report of our engagements in open-source activities every year. So, towards the end of 2023, if you stay tuned, you will be informed about that.
Yep. Thanks Karsten, also for pointing this open-source index out. I think it's always great to have a little bit of a competition there as well, in terms of contributions and so on. And also, it's nice to see, like, the different areas, the different fields where you contribute as a company. That's great to see. From our perspective, as I said before, we'd like to see the sustainable engagement increased, like in the things where we feel that it's currently not very well funded.
It's around the invisible maintainer work, what we talked earlier . And yeah, that we also, yeah, want to, again, create this awareness that this is also securing the business value that everybody gets, or like that the industry gets from the open-source ecosystem.
Maybe as some examples, we're not only involved in the feature driven, v isible, sexy things there. We have a project that is SAP driven that, for instance we just talked about it a month or two ago, that deals with Software Bills of Delivery. So, machine readable, processable formats to basically have the freight papers down the line of building software. If I summarize that correctly
here. A t least I think that's not one of the most sexy, visible things up there, and might even fall under your funding if it wasn't SAP driven. But anyway, does that qualify?
Yeah. Thank you so much, Karsten. So, I think also with the whole SBOM discussion, mainly driven from the Cyber Resilience Act. I think there's still, I mean that's not very sexy as you said before, but still it's going to be a requirement in the future. And we need to have the tooling in place. And that why also the Sovereign Tech Fund supports and funds s ome very interesting initiatives in that field. So, as we talked earlier, like this Rusty SBOMs project is about cargo.
Like which is the build component for Rust plug-in for that system to generate CycloneDX based SBOMs in an automated way. And that's important, I think, to have this as an open-source component that is reliable and that, you know, fulfills this need from the open-source developers out there.
Just to jump in for our listeners really quickly here: you took it from SPODs to SBOMs. And if you go down the history of this podcast, you will find that we differentiate between the Software Bills of Delivery and the Software Bills of Material. Sorry, to be correcting there, or at least adding there. B ut we have this in our podcast series here that we point out that difference.
W ith that though, famous before last question: W here, except for the very obvious home page of the Sovereign Tech Fund, would people go, if they're interested to find out more, want to apply for funding? Is that mainly on the home page or are there other places, YouTube tutorials, image videos, whatever?
So, definitely go to "sovereigntechfund.de". That's our website and we, or I, definitely personally update it pretty frequently. And so all the latest information is on there. We have a pretty lengthy description of sort of our mission and our values, but also a long page about how to apply. And we're also on LinkedIn, if you want to stay up to date that way. We post all about the new projects that we're investing in, there. A lso, on the Fediverse, on Mastodon @[email protected] .
Still on Twitter slash X. And, I think, I could also say you could find us on Bluesky. So, we do have an account there as well. Yeah, always Sovereign Tech Fund. So, just look for that.
All right. Okay. And we'll have the links under the podcast, as usual. Last but not least, if there are three to four points that you want everyone to take away from listening to this, what would they be?
Well, I can, I'll start. S o, definitely, I think Mirko talked a lot, very interestingly, about the invisible work that underpins all of the digital things that we do, our entire digital world. And those components are actually quite fragile, there's sometimes one or two people working on stuff, so remember that.
Yeah, and coming from that, maybe it's important to remember that we are all responsible for maintaining this digital infrastructure, be it the public or the industry.
Yeah. And to round it out, just to say a little bit about us: the Sovereign Tech Fund is unique. Germany here has created something pretty special to support open digital infrastructure. And we're really happy to be pioneering this work and hope to be a blueprint for other countries - like the EU, or maybe the UN - to work on supporting digital infrastructure in the long term.
And then let's close it with that call to action. T hank you very much, Powen and Mirko. Was nice to learn about the Sovereign Tech Fund, was nice to have you as guests today. Please say hi to Robert, by the way, if you meet him next time.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you so much, Karsten.
Right. And thank you all for listening to "The Open Source Way". If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and don't miss the next one. We usually publish every last Wednesday of the month, although we might be taking a break in January. You'll find us on openSAP and in most of those places where you find other podcasts like Apple Podcast or Spotify, or obviously all those open-source podcast clients out there. Thanks again and bye bye.
Bye bye.
Goodbye.