Reading the website this is for committee members only (it has nothing to do with if a project is eligible). This seems to largely be a requirement for tax reasons.
As a side note, I find it unfortunate that often when things like this get posted, e.g. a foundation who supports free-software in this case, the first posts are not "this is a great thing", but instead someone goes through the website until they find something they disagree with and creates a negative debate and misinformation (several people here already understood the sentence to mean that projects led by non-PhDs can't apply).
An alternative perspective is that the original commenter is doing the authors a favour by highlighting that their writing is currently easily misinterpreted and would benefit from revision.
Cash that gets into FDL/LEF is then spent to sponsor existing FLOSS projects or to acquire intellectual property rights of existing works and change their license to FLOSS.
Case 2: the radio hardware of the Open Radio Station (a 4G/5G vRAN base station based on Amarisoft stack and SlapOS) is in the process of being acquired and released as open source hardware. See https://shop.rapid.space/product_module/241/Resource_viewAsS...
The requirement for PhD is here to ensure that all projects that are financed by FDL/LEF have some kind of general interest or innovation, something which is useful to comply with Tax Law
Well, they have no hope of getting tenure (that budget is needed for administration), so it's good that PhD have another option where they can avoid doing any real work* ;)
* Giving people whose talent is thinking the chance to do that is a good idea. Better than losing that talent to management.
This seems to be an unfortunate manifestation of French tax law and culture. This comes off as offensive to those of us who came up through, what we may believe, the more egalitarian, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship model. A PhD may actually be seen as a liability!
It also is grating, as many open source coders and maintainers choose to operate outside of both the academic and Silicon Valley cultures. Why would they want a committee of academics guiding and funding their projects?
All this being said, perhaps there will be positive outcomes from this fund.
That’s an … interesting requirement. In France there is, AFAIK, an exaggerated emphasis on the importance of holding a PhD title. IMHO I can’t really see the strong connection between acquiring an PhD and the ability to successfully lead open source projects.
Simon Peyton Jones would not qualify (though he has an honorary doctorate now).
In OSS scientific software, many PhDs have management jobs, where they write a couple of grand sounding fantasy roadmaps and have creative people who report to them. Printing money basically.
"Printing money" ? Really ? For the main European granting programme (Horizon Europe), the success rate is approximately 5%. In France, for funding schemes like ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche ~= the NSF in the US), it also between 5% and 10%. This means lead researchers need to put enormous time and effort into the grant application process, with extremely random results, even for the best cases.
(As someone who has sat in various pre-selection committees over the last 15 years, i.e. without a final say on who gets funded and who doesn't, I can also add that sometimes the best applications don't get funded, and average or even mediocre ones get funded instead).
And yes, in every organizations, being research or not, you will inevitably have people who end up in management and manage people who do most of the creative work. Does this mean that these managers are (or become) incompetent or useless ? I don't think so.
(For background information on this specific topic, on can (re)read The Pratice of Management by Peter Drucker (1954) ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48018.The_Practice_of... -> "“The manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business” who defines the organization’s mission, develops and retains productive teams, coordinates various activities, sets goals, and gets things done.").
“The manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business”
At best this self-glorification applies to physical work like an Amazon distribution center, where one indeed needs direct people skills of a certain kind.
It applies less to intellectual endeavors in general.
It does not apply at all to software development, where a plethora of successful projects proves the direct opposite. It happens, of course, that projects succeed despite the manager, who still gets the credit.
Fred Brooks' works apply to software, not Peter Drucker's.
As stated on the web site: "In order to be eligible to act on the committee, members are required to have an PhD in Mathematics or Computer Science related disciplines as well as being authors of FLOSS/Free Software. We are currently looking for new committee members." -> The PhD requirement is for sitting on the selection committee only.
Holders of a PhD are considered as "capable of assessing the state of the art" by Tax authorities. Having PhDs in the committee which decides of grants thus reduces to legal risk of later seing tax cuts being cancelled by Tax authorities.
Regarding projects which receive a grant, holding a PhD does not matter.
I don't believe that people with PhDs have "unique attributes". There are, specially in the field of computing science, examples of exceptionally gifted and influential researchers without PhDs (e.g. Denis Ritchie, Simon Peyton-Jones...).
What a Phd recognizes, and is relevant to the project at hand, is the ability "to produce original research that expands the boundaries of knowledge".
(Per Wikipedia: "Because it is an earned research degree, those studying for a PhD are required to produce original research that expands the boundaries of knowledge, normally in the form of a thesis or dissertation, and defend their work against experts in the field. The completion of a PhD is often a requirement for employment as [...] a scientist in many fields.")
> There are, specially in the field of computing science, examples of exceptionally gifted and influential researchers without PhDs
If you know this, and know that people without one can still produce original research that expands the boundaries of knowledge (even giving your own examples) then why do you require one?
As stated elsewhere, this helps establish the credibility of the selection process in the eyes of the French fiscal administration, which, ultimately, is the biggest funder of the FDL (through various tax incentives).
Moreover, as it is a voluntary function, no one is harmed financially by this constraint.
NumFOCUS has a huge overhead for directors and staff ($605,615.79 in 2020). This is not looked upon kindly by OSS authors who are doing the work and get much less (or nothing!).
If this foundation does not have such an overhead and will never create cozy director posts, cozy diversity officer posts etc., then this is a huge credibility boost and I'd mention it on the website (with the explicit promise!).
But then the foundation has to stick with it and not stealthily sneak in CoCs and people after a while.
Regarding the “an PhD” note, I’m finding other phrasing that makes me think the writers were not native English speakers. It’s a French organization after all, so I would expect a few errors in their English. They're not significant.
First of all, it is "a PhD", secondly, this looks like the typical scientific ecosystem power grab that we have seen multiple times in the US.
In the Python scientific space, people doing actual work are exploited ruthlessly.