re: long
@dvzrv@chaos.social With "a foundation being part of a coalition", I assumed you were referring to this part in your article:
"the European Commission through DG CNECT has partnerships with NLnet and the NixOS Foundation"
That is the "partnership" I am referring to; it is (partly) delegating the allocation to the NixOS Foundation, because AIUI the intent is to fund "the NixOS ecosystem" in general, and the Foundation can then decide which things are best to fund for that purpose (in smaller amounts than normal NGI grants), from the total funding made available for "the NixOS ecosystem".
Crucially, if I am understanding the partnership correctly, that means that the NixOS Foundation *does not* have influence over the general allocation of NGI funds. Just over the funding that was already specifically pre-allocated to "the NixOS ecosystem", which is a finite total amount determined before any allocations take place.
I do not believe that that arrangement is exclusive to NixOS; if NGI/NLNet were to believe that "the Arch ecosystem" as a whole is similarly relevant to the goals of their grant program, then I don't see why such a partnership could not be established with eg. the Arch Linux project.
re: long
@dvzrv@chaos.social (Note that I am not involved in NGI or NLNet in any capacity, so I'm going entirely off my second-hand understanding of how this process works! It's very possible that I'm wrong here)
re: long
@dvzrv@chaos.social To illustrate with some completely imaginary numbers:
- Distro A receives 100k in funding
- Distro B receives 100k in funding
- Distro C establishes a partnership covering 100k in funding
- Distro C then allocates 25k of that funding to each of "Project C1, Project C2, Project C3, Project C4", all of which are specific to Distro C
The total funding for any of the distros isn't different from any of the others; there is just an additional delegation step.
(These are not the actual numbers of course, and in reality I do not believe that "equal funding for every distro" is a goal of NGI, this is just to illustrate that there being a partnership does not in and of itself change anything about the distribution of funds)