Depending on your lab interests it could be relatively easy to fit the topic into a research agenda.
There are a ton of components in the stack that could be secured for example. Some funded projects went this route, although they were not necessarily from the mobile stack.
EU Horizon is a great idea. The grant call I linked is actually a EU Horizon project which is managed by https://nlnet.nl, who in turn allocates the grants I think.
Since the grants are relatively small, applying is simple. Bigger Horizon projects are a lot of paperwork, but perhaps one could be submitted in the future if the community gains some momentum.
And ties with Russian companies should be cut off in order to get EU-funding.
I think if the scope of the projects is kept within the open components of the Mer stack, this should not be necessary as this is independent from Jolla and benefits lots of other open projects. But of course, in the long run, it is desirable for Jolla to severe those ties to be able to attract funding on their own.
I would suggest porting to a Gigaset phone (e.g GS5) would be great.
A soon to be EU OS with an EU built phone sounds like a winning offering, and squarely in the " TRUSTWORTHINESS AND DATA SOVEREIGNTY" realm.
This would be a particularly credible project with a high chance of a successful outcome, given that @piggz has form.
Just needs some EU entity to front it, and some degree of buy in from Gigaset and Jolla.
(From my perspective the biggest single SFOS issue is that for the last N years, by the time a stable version is available, the Sony phone is discontinued, and they have sold so few that there is no significant 2nd hand supply. In a few months Jolla (& Sony) will move on to porting to the next phone, and leave this one with unresolvable issues. There has not been a commercially available, working, SFOS phone for years AFAIK)
The GS5 port is already work-in-progress … would be cool to also have EU funding though 
Don’t know how much we have to write up in the application. But sounds interesting, even if we miss this deadline. Not sure that they would be interested in supporting closed source SFOS. In this respect, SFOS wouldn’t be attractive alternative. So, would be great to have some more general goal that would be of interest for many. But that discussion looks to be under another thread 
Great that you found this opportunity and raised it over here!
My strategy here is to highlight the opensource ‘aspects’. Small steps are better than standing still. Let’s begin with Interest to create a cooperative - #53 by dcaliste
Here, we have a mix, but SFOS pushes to upstream, aka KDE and co.
Let’s list some of the ‘funding worthy’ aspects (just riffing):
Thanks. I think the easy way to work around the closeness issue is to only attempt funding open components in the stack. Even components that are pretty close to the UI can be reused by other projects and benefit the whole Linux on mobile use case.
For example, postmarketOS uses the open Mer stack (postmarketOS + Glacier is IMHO the most usable alternative to SFOS right now).
My goal is also to have a completely free stack, from CPU to apps. In practice, I think most SFOS code is currently either free or de facto open source. There is of course room for improvement.
I was wondering if something like the work of making jails (fire/sailjail) safely use dbus would be a good internship project?:
Perhaps you can give us some more concrete examples that would fit? I tossed of a list: Interest to create a cooperative - #47 by poetaster
It just occured to me to ask @cypherpunks if he’d consider Music Explorer ‘fundable’. My take is that a few apps/platforms tend to dominate the exploration of music (spotify, youtube). Music Explorer goes some way to move the goal posts.
Another grant, only for teams based in Germany: Prototypefund - We fund open source projects
They are funding GNOME shell on mobile: GNOME Shell on mobile: An update – GNOME Shell & Mutter
Another grant in Germany: https://sovereigntechfund.de/
About digital infrastructure and software in the public interest.
Ah, this might be a good fund for a project like map-tiling-service license delegate (for lack of a better description). EDIT: looks like next year …
The pilot round will be announced in October 2022. Regular funding and further activities of the Sovereign Tech Fund will start in 2023.
Accessibility improvements to existing apps would certainly qualify. A recent ticket: Important for mobility impaired people. Option for user to set the changeover time. · Issue #23 · poetaster/fahrplan · GitHub leads me to think I need to invest more time in these fundamental questions. What existing industrial processes encourage/facilitate designing for accessibility?
And, I finally have to admit I’m defeated.
I bit off a bit more than was chewable in the short time when trying to formulate a proposal for a license / api key service.
I should have chosen something more discrete. I’m not going to make the prototypefund or the nl deadlines. Sigh.
There will be further rounds and opportunities where we now have a head start. Thanks!
Yes! I’ll document what I’ve done so far on two applications and post it when I have a moment.
There are again new deadlines approaching. See: NLnet; Open call for funding
I’m interested in taking any open component of the Linux/Mer stack SFOS is using and hardening it (e.g. verifying formally that it has no bugs).
Any ideas of some small and critical libraries that could be good to get going with this?
Thanks for the reminder. I only have really (really) rough notes up, but I’ll see if I can get some work done on: https://keypeer.org/ That was the application idea I ran out of time on.