Welcome to NLnet Foundation
Supporting the open internet since 1997
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
The goal of Restack is to build a healthy Open Internet Stack. The fund provides practical and financial support to projects contributing to an open, resilient and trustworthy digital infrastructure, paving the way to permissionless innovation and user autonomy.
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 Fediversity is a pilot programme focussing on bringing 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.
CodeSupply is a pilot programme which addresses data challenges in cybersecurity, software supply chain management, and regulatory and open source license compliance. Funding is available for free and open source efforts that align with the programme's three main objectives.
ELFA (Encrypted Local First Architecture) is a pilot programme which aims to create a full-fledged collaborative and decentralized open platform capable of providing private workspaces and healthy social networking. This includes an integrated suite of collaborative apps with end-to-end encryption.
In addition we run the NGI Zero Review programme, which provides practical support to projects within the larger Next Generation Internet initiative to improve their quality, maturity and usability by provding services such as hardening security and privacy, improving accessibility, tackling open source licensing compliance issues and much more.
