Germany offers up to €30k for 6 months of working on OSS
As a german freelancer and long-time software dev with hundreds of releases of tens of apps/libraries, open source, under my belt, i can only say:This project is misguided.They want only "new" stuff. You may come in with something that already exists, but even then you need to prove how you're creating a "new" feature on top of that.However funding that is pointless. People do that ALL the time. I have tons of such prototypes i have made myself, over the years and i know thousands of those among OSS dev friends. They are typically works of passion and happen regardless of any other circumstances.Meanwhile the real problem is maintenance of existing software to combat bit rot. It usually requires experienced people who need to separate time from their already full schedules, but is largely ignored. See PGP.