Funding

German and European Politics struggles to understand the economics of software — there is no funding for green software.

greeNsort^® was realized without funding, because research sponsors and start up-sponsors in Germany failed to fund a project that serves the public good, has less risk than research and better economics than start-ups.

EU Funding is a mess

Much of the software in use today is free. If you want people to use greener software, it must also be free, otherwise nobody uses it. But there is no serious funding for free software¹, let alone green software. EU-funding (whether for climate or innovation) is only available for projects of multi-partner-collaborations, bureaucracy is overwhelming and only feasible for established players, all the money which is meant to promote innovation trickles down established channels and never reaches critical mass. National and state funding (we tried Germany and Bavaria) is only available for established research institutions or for-profit companies. For private entrepreneurs focusing on public value there is at best small project funding like hackathon events².

Wasting public goods

Protecting public goods is already a challenge:

The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action — Wikipedia

There are suggestions by Nobel Price winners³ to cope with the free-rider problem of public goods. But there are few implementations against free-riding, by contrast, economic wisdom on free-riding is often ignored by governments or overuled by courts.

Creating public goods

The situation is even worse when it comes to creating the public good.

Thus, in current theory the existence of a public good is assumed prior to the government provision of that good. Yet no social, economic or technological mechanism is even faintly suggested that ensures this existence. Many of the same theoretical principles and practicalities of creation, maintenance and governance also apply to free goods — John Forster (1999)⁴

This is particularly true for technology and even more so for knowledge:

technology has long been seen as an important domain for government, in view of the market failure case for government intervention, arising from the difficulty of appropriating the gains from innovation and the case in favour of widespread diffusion of the benefits … knowledge is not just a matter of technology … markets are not very satisfactory for spreading knowledge … information and communication technologies are of course, by definition, the carriers of information. The information they carry is of potential benefit to everybody on this planet … concerning technology, it is evident that the production of key technologies will continue to be the domain of the developed economies, almost by definition. But the application of technologies affects all countries, even those at earliest stages of development. … Without losing all the many benefits of markets, the state can also be … entrepreneur, especially in its ability to have a ‘vision’ of the future, and alongside that, its capability of constructing institutions (such as redefining property rights) that might help realise such a vision … Freedom of information and legislation to encourage it should be seen as a public duty on the part of the state … Along with this goes the need for a tight performance monitoring system to ensure that the ‘prizes’ are justly earned. In practice, subsidies from the state have often acted to increase inequality and aggrandize private power — United Nations (1999)⁵

Clever governments compensate for market failures

The Critical Role of Federal Investment: In assessing how to maintain America’s leadership in networking and information technology, a common fallacy is to overestimate the role of technology development and to underestimate the role of fundamental research. In fact, computer science research, carried out to a great extent in America’s research universities with funding from Federal agencies such as DARPA and NSF, lies at the heart of this leadership. — Report to the President and Congress⁶

For example the US have

the NSF funds fundamental research
the DARPA funds the development of emerging technologies
the NIST develops measurements and standards

and attract talent from all over the world

we see that the United States has been, overwhelmingly, the largest contributor to algorithm development with 38% of all discoverers born there and 64% of all discoverers working there — Thompson et al (2020)⁷

A US publication might be biased here, so let’s do a fact-check for the progress in sorting during the last decades (using a subjective selection of relevant works):

1999 Funnelsort — Prokop (Bachelor at KIT Germany, Master thesis at MIT) — attracted from Germany to US
2002 Timsort — Tim Peters based on a 1993 paper by Peter McIlroy — US
2002 Lazy Funnelsort — Brodal, Fagerberg Vinther — Denmark
2006 Librarysort — Bender, Farach-Colton, & Mosteiro — US
2009 Dual-Pivot Quicksort — Yaroslavskiy — Russia
2014 Block-Quicksort — Edelkamp&Weiß — Germany
2014 Grailsort — Astrelin, based on work of Huang&Langston — Russia based on US foundation
2015 Pattern-Defeating-Quicksort — Orson Peters — US
2017 Skasort — US
2017 IPS4o — Axtmann, Witt, Ferizovic & Sanders (KIT) — Germany

That’s more or less compatible with the above claim, well, unless the greeNsort^® algorithms are taken into consideration.

Germany is trying to catch-up

Well organized as we Germans are, we founded two moonshot innovation agencies, a military would-like DARPA Cyberagency and a non-military would-like ARPA SPRIN-D, which dilutes effectivness — Angela Merkel⁸

How are they doing? Cyberagency chief Christoph Igel has given up the fight and returned to the German Armed Forces. SPRIN-D chief Rafael Laguna de la Vera has messed up also: he invited nerds like us to apply for funding. We did, and the result was a 2.5 year kafkaesk bureaucratic evaluation process that caused us months of work, promised funding and finally cancelled the promise based on a tendentious, unscientific expert opinion. SPRIND would not even recognize a leap in innovation if you handed them the frog on a silver platter⁹.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts — Bill Gates