What people say about NLnet foundation

Nobody can escape the digital world any more, but the merest glimpse at the news shows that the digital economy does not yet produce the right incentives for businesses to invest in and research urgently needed fundamental technologies. That is why we need the NLnet Foundation: it consistently finds and funds interesting and important projects particularly with respect to the Internet. Its competitive open call mechanism is how it finds and selects projects from independent developers and small teams. Often, these are projects that benefit everyone, so it is in our collective interest that they be funded even without a business case. The Foundation has an uncanny ability to find and support the right projects, and I heartily recommend them.

Andrew Sulliven, Chair Internet Architecture Board 2015-2017

The NLnet Foundation is better at identifying and supporting promising computing projects than any other non-profit. The NLnet Foundation was the first outside funding for Ksplice, and NLnet's early support helped Ksplice to perform important software development and later receive more than $1M in other awards, including recognition by the Wall Street Journal as the top security innovation of the year. The NLnet Foundation's unique model enables them to achieve greater impact with their funding than other non-profits.

Jeff Arnold, founder of KSplice, now part of Oracle

In 2008, NLnet funded improvements to Hidden Services and Tor for low-bandwidth environments. This was very important for activists in Iran, who faced slow networks, Distributed Denial of Service attacks on their websites, and secret police who used online information to track down and arrest participants during the protests of 2009.

Roger Dingledine, president TOR Foundation (United States)

NLnet helped me with several projects in the past that nobody else would fund and ultimately led to some good results. I'm really grateful for their support. They did an excellent job and weren't bureaucratic, which is much appreciated.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Free University, Amsterdam

NoScript couldn't be the powerful and flexible security tool which we know today, if the NLnet Foundation wasn't there to support ambitious leaps forward, such as its Application Boundaries Enforcer module or its porting to Android smartphones, made possible by NLnet's encouragement and financial aid. NoScript is just one of the many public interest open source projects which are thankful to the NLnet people. If you want the Internet to grow strong, safe and free, but you don't know how to help, contribute to NLnet: they do know and care.

Giorgio Maone, NoScript

In the past years, NLnet Foundation supported valuable technological projects promoting a free and secure internet. Dutch digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom in the past also profited from NLnet's commitment to privacy. As a free and secure internet remains as important as ever, we are very happy that NLnet continues to support privacy-related projects.

Ot van Daalen, Partner with Project Moore and former director Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)

Our world runs on information technologies that are poorly understood by most policy makers and dominated by commercial interests. NLnet is a vital institution that supports important research, development and awareness projects in areas that have high value for society but that may not (yet) be commercially viable. IT is too important to be left just to the technology vendors. When government fails it is great to see private, non-profit institutions like NLnet taking up the slack and making sure projects that are critical to society are realised.

Arjen Kamphuis, Netherlands

NLnet's support came at a critical time, and enabled us to retain our core team, make an initial software release and make the progress that enabled us to go on to get longer-term funding, so that we can achieve our vision of giving the gift of free mobile communications to those who currently lack it. The light-weight application process and fast turn-around were critical in ensuring that we could focus on what we were doing. The foundation also provided us with great feedback that helped us to improve what we were doing.

Paul Gardner-Stephen, Flinders University (Australia)

The "bootstrap" effect of the NLnet grants can be enormous. NLnet really has a nose for developments that will become very important in the future, and helps to get them to happen.

From its early days NLnet foundation has set itself the task to let new developments take off in area of internet and information technology, and open source.

With a limited starter subsidy researchers can develop their ideas through prototypes and publications to the point where other financial resources become available to further build out the R&D.

Our project (Adaptive Hypermedia for All) is an excellent example: it started with an NLnet grant developing a general purpose adaptive hypermedia platform (AHA!, Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture). With this project our research group at Eindhoven University of Technology catapulted a new line in research in adaptive systems that has led to projects with the Netherlands science foundation (NWO), ITEA projects and even a European Seventh Framework project with 15 partners and a budget of over five million euro.

Prof. dr. Paul de Bra, Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)

I have never ever heard of anyone that's even close to the contributions NLnet is making. This is not just about the amounts, but also their understanding of the FLOSS world on one hand as well as their good knowledge of the technical side. All this contributes to an extremely efficient and incredibly helpful FLOSS angel!

Emil Ivov, project lead Jitsi (France)

NLnet recently provided us with funds to work on creating an open source project aimed at providing a common control system for DNS servers. This grant has allowed a small business to step back from billable work for a while and given us a great opportunity to work on something that we strongly believe will help the wider Internet community.

In addition we have used much of the software that has resulted from NLnet's long-term funding of NLnet Labs. This work has been vital in ensuring that there are diverse code bases of standards complient software available, which in turn has greatly improved the security and reliability of the Internet's infrastructure.

John Dickinson, CEO Sinodun (UK)

Funding innovation is a very tricky business. Structures either become too heavy to be manageable for innovators, or the organizations fund well-sold nonsense because the decision is made by people without sufficient understanding of the state of the art. NLnet has an outstanding track record over many years of combining high levels of competency and understanding for strategically important technologies with administrative processes that don't get in the way of the innovation. This combination with its focus on technologies that provide software freedom make NLnet unique, and clearly one of a handful of organization that I can wholeheartedly recommend for support.

Georg Greve, CEO Kolab Systems (Switzerland)

NLnet has been the only one funding organization able to really inspire my dreams and let me do what was really required to get them come true.

I can only say that, in the free software world, NLnet is the only one able to really deliver resources to independent developers or associations. All other funding sources have real limitations and are not really geared towards what developers dream to do with their software. NLnet funding has been vital for Sabayon and many other projects.

Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon Linux

The internet is ours. Modern society cannot function without it. It is the most important method of communication right now. NLnet helps to improve the internet and the way we communicate on it. They fund development of software, protocols and standards that improve the way we use the internet and that helps us to keep in touch with everyone. They do this by supporting the technological groundwork.

NLnet is effective at putting it's resources to use by combining it with the efforts of active communities that have the same goal. Their contributions create room to think out of the box for a little longer on the way to the next jump. Their focus on standards and openness is essential to their success.

As developer of WebODF, I'm very grateful to NLnet. The project would not have been able to grow out of its first inception on its own.

Jos van den Oever, project lead webODF (The Netherlands)

Anonymous communication is a fundamental requirement for journalists when gathering news, in order to protect sources and whistle blowers. We live in an era where the attempt to control internet traffic is gaining momentum. Thanks to the proof of concept funded through NLnet in the Small Sister Project, we were able to reach a point where other people could embed our solution into real-world communication products. This important contribution to helping the next generation of whistleblowers do their work could never have been achieved without the help of NLnet.

Brenno de Winter, investigative journalist (The Netherlands)

For years I had been thinking about automating the (very necessary) license compliance work I was doing on an almost daily basis, but I never got around to doing it because paid work intervened. A grant from Stichting NLnet made it possible for me to free up time and finally implement the first few versions of what became the Binary Analysis Tool.

After the first version that confirmed that it was indeed possible to automate a lot of work efficiently the project took off. There is a solid tool that has attracted interest in the field and consequent donations to the project from third parties, it has spawned academic research and it for sure has made my work a lot easier.

Armijn Hemel, gpl-violations.org/Tjaldur Software Governance Solutions (Netherlands)

NLnet is a unique institution in providing guidance and funding of overhead costs for open source projects. In helping open source developers realize their technology dreams through seed funding, NLnet has for many years provided the last crucial ingredient for many of their projects. The often small contribution by NLnet helps technology entrepreneurs follow through with projects that they already spent countless hours preparing. This was the case with SRLabs' GSM project, which NLnet took from a research stage to today's standard open GSM analysis platform. Thank you, NLnet.

Karsten Nohl, Germany

Over the years, NLnet has been extremely helpful and pleasant funding organization to work with. Within a friendly, non-bureaucratic process NLnet was able to select best open-source projects that provide impact on such crucial Internet issues as DNSSEC.

Prof. dr. Andrei Gurtov, HIIT (Finland)

The realXtend open source project benefited greatly from the assistance we got from the NLnet Foundation at a crucial time in our development. Funding open source projects in critical stages of development can be a real game changer and potentially produce huge results in the future, which is why it's such a good thing that there are organizations like NLnet who are willing to do just that.

Antti Ilomaki, project manager realXtend (Finland)

NLnet supported the establishment of the Binary Analysis Tool project through their rolling program of grants for new technology ideas. By providing seed capital, strategic support and objective input, they fostered an initiative that would have struggled to obtain purely voluntary or commercial investment, yet which delivered long term benefit in reducing risk and uncertainty around Free Software supply chain management. Perhaps most admirable is NLnet's commitment to sustainable investment, and their requirement that each project that receives support plans for a self-funding, lasting future. This is an exceptional organization, and one that has contributed a great deal towards ensuring that open, empowering and widely available solutions are provided to the emerging information society.

Shane Coughlan, Opendawn Consulting (Japan)

NLnet's help was essential to getting FSFE's legal department off the ground. Over the past five years, FSFE Legal has served hundreds of individuals, projects and businesses with advice and support. This has greatly helped people who might have felt uncertain about adopting or deploying Free Software. The importance of NLnet's assistance on finance, strategy and communication. Stichting NLnet has played a lasting role in the growth of our activities. Today, FSFE Legal is a key provider of impartial legal knowledge around Free Software in Europe, and facilitates the world's largest network of legal experts in this field. This success is largely due to NLnet's fostering of an inclusive approach to information technology. With its role as an angel investor and strategic partner, NLnet has made a very real difference in the technology world.

Karsten Gerloff, former president FSFE (Germany)

NLnet have a clear vision of how they want to move open information software forward. They also understand commercial realities and are well able to create projects that are beneficial to all the parties. They have monitored our project carefully and provided advice and help when needed, and they have also been flexible in responding to the inevitable changes that affect the course of the work.

Robin LaFontaine, CEO DeltaXML Ltd (UK)

An open Internet runs on free/libre software. It is often very hard for technical projects that have a public utility rather than a commercial one to get sustainable funding. The NLnet Foundation is one of the few organisations that have enough expertise to financially support this type of project. Their grantmaking process is one of the leanest that I've encountered: it puts the results in the center and sees the rest as overhead.

Hans de Zwart, Director Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)

The NLnet Foundation has demonstrated a deep technical understanding of Internet security and privacy problems, and has played an invaluable role in funding work to solve them.

The NLnet Foundation's funding of EFF's SSL Observatory project has assisted us in studying and documenting structural problems in the Internet's encryption infrastructure. With their assistance, we have been able to focus the community's attention on fixing these problems.

Peter Eckersley, Technology Projects Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA)

NLnet has supported Collabora on a number of projects spanning from real-time communications to desktop security infrastructure on FOSS platforms. In every case the experience has been very positive and we've moved quickly from proposal to funding and delivery of valuable standards and implementations.

I can't overstate the importance of supporting NLnet to help them continue their vital investment in these important areas.

Robert McQueen, CEO Collabora (UK)