The KDE project announced the receipt of almost 1.3 million euros from the STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) for development in 2026 and 2027. The purpose of providing funding is to increase the reliability of the architecture and modernize the technology stack. KDE plans to use the money to improve the stability and security of key infrastructure elements, communication services, and products.
It is noted that the allocated funds will help bring the project’s main products, such as the KDE Plasma desktop environment and the KDE Linux distribution, to a new level that will allow ordinary users, companies, and government agencies to restore their privacy, security, and control over digital sovereignty. In 2023 and 2024, the GNOME project also received a million euros. The STF sees funding for key desktop environments used by Linux as an investment in the resilience and reliability of the digital infrastructure that modern society relies on.
The STF was founded in Germany to encourage the development of open digital infrastructure and open-source ecosystems. The fund was created with funds provided by Ministry economy and climate protection in Germany, and is supervised by the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation SPRIND. It is noted that investing in open-source software contributes to the development of innovation in Germany and Europe, and also increases competitiveness, productivity, and the ability to promote 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) |
In total, since 2022, the STF organization has invested 37.3 million euros in 108 open projects, including FreeBSD, GNOME, Samba, Rust, Pipewire, Eclipse, OpenStreetMap, Arch