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, ARPA2, WireGuard, NoScript, Tor Hidden Services, GPLv3, GNUnet, and webODF. And many more ....
Active funds
The NGI Zero Core focuses on the modernisation of the internet architecture. It aims to upgrade the open internet infrastructure, by funding free and open source technological building blocks and developing and delivering new internet standards to users — working towards a more resilient, trustworthy and sustainably 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.
In addition 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...
Coming soon: we invite you to have a look at the Next Generation Internet pilots: NGI Fediversity (creating a reproducible hosting stack), NGI TALER (privacy preserving digital payments) and NGI Mobifree (an effort to further open up the mobile ecosystem). And if you are working in these domains, we might be able to onboard your project through a grant.
