This is a closed letter by some people who live on EU money protesting about some other people receiving EU money. It is only comprehensbile in the context of EU-funded employment schemes and you need Brussels-expertise to understand it. I have worked with Horizon funded projects before, a wonderful waste of my time in adding an adequate amount of logos to powerpoint slides.
Well, I have no issue imaging how bureaucratic, inconclusive, how much flow of public money on some friends of friends etc it could be but the point is simple: public money, public code need or public developers, or the State hire them to develop it's own infra, ENTIRE infra, or the public pay FLOSS projects that use, according to certain criteria to ensure public money, public code principle.
In such terms most EU States have done "something", and the EU have done something (for instance the digital euro actually in an initial phase is based on GNU Taler, with the development badly handled in semi-secrecy by a private-public consortium), but most of their actions was bad in design terms. Sometimes the public have offered mere FLOSS supporting infra, of dubious quality and ultimately not that needed (if you develop a serious FLOSS project you likely already have a personal infra to work on it, you might like funds to keep it up but not change it for a State offered "as is" new infra) but they do not provide a damn FLOSS coherent evolutionary line.
We have for instance eIDAS (digital identity, form ID docs to e-signature, e-invoicing etc) ANY EU country have it's own personal variant, formally compatible with all the others except for some "extensions" that breaks practical compatibility most of the time, large parts of eIDAS are public money, public code, but most interesting parts are proprietary with even unclear ownership.
The point is that's about time to MANDATE FLOSS the entire sw stack (with target for the hw one, we can't have open now) and a clear public development and public support to FLOSS projects so we can have one, FLOSS is free, but not gratis.