Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has done a wonderful job providing funding to various open-source projects for advancing their work on free software. STF has been a huge success for prominent open-source projects while now it's also preparing a pilot program for STF Fellowships to provide funding to open-source maintainers that may be doing important work across multiple projects.

Complementing the Sovereign Tech Fund's open-source project sponsorships, they are preparing to launch the Fellowship Pilot Program as a means of funding open-source developers doing important work across multiple projects that may otherwise not fit well within the confines of their existing project sponsorships.

The STF Fellowship program intends to cover developers doing impactful work across multiple open-source projects and may not otherwise be receiving funding or enough funding as-is. This is initially a pilot program to see how well the new program will work out for all parties involved.

The Sovereign Tech Fund will start accepting fellowship applications by the end of this quarter (September) and they will announce selected maintainers in Q4.

More details on these plans via the Sovereign Tech Fund blog .