Welcome to NLnet Foundation
We support organisations and people who contribute to an open internet for all. We fund projects that help fix the internet through open hardware, open software, open standards, open science and open data. After its historical contribution to the early internet in Europe in the 1980's, NLnet has been financially supporting the open internet since 1997.
Projects we support
NLnet has contributed funding to many important and very visible projects around fundamental standards from securing the core routing protocols and the domain name system of the internet to safer email, vendor-independent videoconferencing, more reliable wireless networks and private instant messaging - all based on open standards and verifiable open source software and/or hardware. It spawned the world-renowned NLnet Labs, and supported great open source projects like Jitsi, Peertube, WireGuard, NoScript, Tor Hidden Services, GPLv3, GNUnet, and CryptPad. And many more ....
Active funds
NGI Zero Core focuses on the modernisation of the internet architecture. It aims to upgrade the open internet infrastructure, by funding technological building blocks and developing new internet standards to users — working towards a more resilient, trustworthy and open internet for all.
The goal of the NGI Zero Commons Fund is to reclaim the public nature of the internet. It helps to deliver, mature and scale new and existing internet commons across the whole technology spectrum, from libre silicon to middleware, from P2P infrastructure to convenient end user applications.
NGI Pilots
NGI Pilots are dedicated efforts by small consortia to develop technologies in a specific domain. Each Pilot has part of its budget reserved to fund third-party contributions. Anyone can apply.
NGI TALER is a pilot programme with the very concrete objective to roll out a new, best-in-class electronic payment system. It builds on the strong foundations of GNU Taler — the privacy-preserving digital payment system developed by the GNU community and Taler Systems SA.
NGI Mobifree is a pilot programme designed to create more ethical and human mobile software involving a number of Android-based open source efforts. Let's get beyond the status quo and create a virtuous cycle of innovation within and on top of the foundation of Mobifree.
NGI Fediversity is a pilot programme to bring easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. It aims to provide everyone with high-quality, secure IT systems in a way that runs everywhere and scales effortlessly.
Support services
In addition to these active funds, we run the NGI Zero Review programme, which supports projects within the larger Next Generation Internet initiative to improve their quality and inclusiveness — for instance by hardening security and privacy, improving accessibility, tackling open source licensing compliance issues and through standardisation. >> more...
