The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is a relatively new German government initiative that aims to strengthen the open source ecosystem. It invests in “foundational technologies that enable the creation of other software”. When it was created in 2022, seven projects from a wide range of technologies received funding initially. As of today, 60 technologies have been supported with a total investment sum of 23.5 million euros.
I have been intrigued and following its work since its inception. When I left Gradle last March, I applied for funding to continue my work as a maintainer of JUnit. Due to some internal restructuring at the agency managing the program, it took a while to get through the application process. But in August 2024, I finally signed a contract with them that will allow me to focus on JUnit for about a year. I was and am still stoked, happy, and grateful for this opportunity!
As explained in my announcement on GitHub, the work is comprised of a set of predefined milestones that have been agreed upon as part of the contract. The goal is to improve the long-term sustainability of the project as well as downstream projects. JUnit will, of course, remain an independent project, and the investment does not mean that the STF will be influencing JUnit’s roadmap apart from the milestones they are commissioning.
Fast-forward to today, it’s already 2025 and the first five months of work supported by the STF have already passed. So what has been achieved so far? In this series of blog posts, I will go into detail for each milestone and share some observations I made along the way.