To people confused or wondering why it's too little, too late, too incompetent, etc.:
The EU makes a lot more sense when you understand it's a neoliberal institution. Just giving people money to work on open source directly would violate state aid/market disruption rules, they aren't allowed to do that because that could negatively impact the profit of some shareholder somewhere. Member states that want to do that even have to ask permission from the commission if they want to give aid to companies [1].
Everything is like that with the EU, they aren't like China that can just put money whereever to develop or fix strategically, rather the EU can't do anything strategically, or fix anything. It's by design they aren't incompetent, that is what market liberalism is. It's core to what they mean when they say "European values".
[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/state-aid/overview_e...
> The EU makes a lot more sense when you understand it's a neoliberal institution
I think that's a perfect summary.
As an aside, regarding what I would like EU to do in opensource - when American government writes some code, it must be put in the public domain (no copyright). EU doesn't have a similar rule.
BTW, this doesn't just apply to code -- everything the US govt releases publicly is in the public domain. This is why, for example, you can find US Foreign Service Institute language textbooks floating around the net.
That's true, it's an interesting case where the EU is even more ideologically committed than the US, like licenses on photographs taken by ESA vs. NASA for example, but it's everything.
With universities it's similar, publicly funded research gets patented (including software!) and exploited by private enterprise, but even worse private industry dictates the areas of research so it's impossible for there to ever be a coherent research strategy in the EU.