29 Free and Open Source Projects Receive Grants to Build Digital Commons

Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing

• uberSDIO — Add UHS-II to open hardware SD controller

  This project develops a Verilog hardware RTL controller for handling SD cards from an FPGA. This controller works using the SDIO interface, and the project will add support for the UHS-II standard. This include an additional row of electrical connections on them, and feature an entirely new set of protocols: FD156, HD312, FD312, and FD624. These protocols promise throughputs of up to 624 MBytes/sec. Project outcomes include the Verilog IP, the simulation testbench, formal properties, and a hardware test to demonstrate and validate the read/wite performance of the SDIO controller on real FPGA hardware capable of implementing the both UHS-I and UHS-II hardware standards. The gateware will be deployed on a custom printed circuit board, as there are currently no FPGA boards available that provide the electrical interfaces required for these advanced SDIO standards.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/uberSDIO

• RA-Sentinel AoA — Direction aware sensing of RF-based attacks

  RA-Sentinel is a small, low-power wide band radio receiver device that automatically detects various malicious attacks on Wifi access points, such as Man in the Middle and Denial of Service attacks. The RA-Sentinel project is designed to protect your home WiFi from unwanted cyber threats. Think of it as a digital watchdog for your internet connection that barks when someone from the outside tries to break in. The device will enhance internet safety for ordinary users by monitoring any Wifi cell. The RA-Sentinel Multi-Channel project aims to enhance the existing RA-Sentinel system by developing a 4-channel, 2.4 GHz RF front-end. This upgrade will enable the system to determine the direction of RF-based attacks. By introducing a multi-channel, phase-coherent reception system, we can estimate the Angle of Arrival (AoA) of incoming signals. This will help identify and locate threats such as jamming, spoofing, or unauthorized transmissions.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/RA-Sentinel-directional

• RA-Sentinel Code Liberation — Royalty free synthesizable Verilog code for signal processing

  RA-Sentinel is a small, low-power wide band radio receiver device that automatically detects various malicious attacks on Wifi access points, such as Man in the Middle and Denial of Service attacks. The RA-Sentinel project is designed to protect your home WiFi from unwanted cyber threats. The RA-Sentinel Code Liberation project replaces hardware-specific "black box" components in RA-Sentinel with fully portable, openly licensed code that anyone can use, modify, and redistribute. The project will lower entry barriers to FPGA development, ensure long-term sustainability free from vendor licensing restrictions and product deprecation, and empower the global community to innovate without costly proprietary constraints. This work directly supports digital sovereignty, inclusive access to technology, and fostering community-driven innovation.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/RA-Sentinel-liberation

Network infrastructure incl. routing, P2P and VPN

• EcoNet Linux — Add Linux kernel support for EcoNet MIPS processors

  There are millions of Fiber and DSL modems around the world based on the EcoNet processor family. When telecoms upgrade their networks, these devices are discarded as e-waste because they are only supported by an aging and proprietary OS based on Linux 2.6. Most of these devices have 128 to 512MB of memory and often even USB ports, making them even more capable than many pure wifi routers. The EcoNet Linux project is firstly about supporting these EcoNet processors in mainline Linux and OpenWRT so that these devices can have a second life as wifi routers or even small home servers. Secondly, the project aims to make the first headway into open source support for the EPON fiber optic modem component. This will (for the first time) open up the possibility for using open source fiber modems with ISPs deployments as well as for private and community passive fiber optic networks.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Econet-Linux-mainline

• WPA3 support for OpenBSD 802.11 wireless — Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 for OpenBSD

  This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the diversity and resilience of the global IT ecosystem.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/OpenBSD-wifi-WPA3

Software engineering, protocols, interoperability, cryptography, algorithms, proofs

• Adding 32-bit ARM support to QBE and Hare — Full Arm32 support for QBE compiler

  Many affordable and widely used devices, ranging from older smartphones to embedded systems, rely on 32-bit ARM processors. In fact for many devices it doesn't make sense to use 64-bit CPU's.

  Hare is a new systems programming language, designed to be simple and reliable, that depends on QBE, a lightweight compiler backend, to generate target machine code. However programs compiled with Hare cannot currently run on these devices because its compiler backend (QBE) only supports 64-bit hardware.

  This project will add full ARM32 support to QBE, making Hare usable on millions of existing computers. By extending the lifetime of older hardware and opening Hare to more platforms, the project helps developers and users alike benefit from a more diverse and sustainable open source ecosystem.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/QBE-32-bit-ARM-support

• GoActivityPub — Help people develop Fediverse software in Go

  GoActivityPub provides a batteries included suite of modules for making the creation of ActivityPub applications easier for Go developers. It was designed to offer a middle ground between the highly dynamic nature of the Activity-Vocabulary and the constraints of the Go programming language, with emphasis on strong typing, minimal resource footprint and very little "magic". It has distinct components for the vocabulary types and processing of activities, an HTTP client which supports authorizing to servers with both ActivityPub specific and traditional methods, multiple storage backends, and other low level helper modules.

  The current goal is to improve the experience for new developers through better documentation, increased robustness and a stabilized API, while also adding the support for Activity-Vocabulary extensions through code generation.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/GoActivityPub

• Husk — Pass-through solution for automatic OpenPGP encryption

  Husk is an email filter (milter) for MTAs which encrypts emails while they pass through it. It facilitates Web-of-Trust technologies to use decentralized and federated certificate authorities as sources for authenticated OpenPGP certificates. It aims to reduce the amount of administrative effort of obtaining and keeping them up to date by establishing narrow, focused trust delegations. Husk can be used to encrypt emails for services which cannot encrypt on their own – like notification systems or issue trackers, or being used at the end of transport to implement zero-access encryption (for email at rest).

  Husk is written in Rust and uses Sequoia PGP for encryption and certificate handling.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Husk

• Latest OMEMO support to Converse.js with libomemo.js — E2EE for web-based XMPP client

  Converse.js is a web-based chat client written in JavaScript, built around XMPP ("Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol") - the designated IETF standard for instant messaging. OMEMO is a standardised way to provide end to end encryption within XMPP based on the Noise protocol/Double Ratchet Algorithm which provides forward secrecy. This project will finalise support for the latest version of OMEMO protocol in Converse.js, bringing both state-of-the-art security based on the Noise protocol in private messaging, as well as standards-based interoperability between several messaging applications and services.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Converse.js-OMEMO

• NoScript Commons Library: Surrogate Scripts — Reusable script replacement functionality for privacy/security browser extensions

  The NoScript Commons Library is a collection of reusable modules facilitating the cross-browser development and maintenance of privacy and security browser extensions such as NoScript. This projects aims to add a "Surrogate Scripts" component, for on-the-fly replacement of blocked scripts with configurable shims. This would help ensure that web pages continue to function even if they depend on harmful scripts or actively try to obstruct protections against them.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/NoScript-surrogate

• Servo WebAPIs for Service Worker — Non-blocking, async Service Workers for Servo browser engine

  The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo-ServiceWorker-WebAPI

• Support for 64-bit integer expressions in Kaitai Struct — Cross-language code generation for binary parsing

  Kaitai Struct (KS) is a tool for working with binary formats. It introduces a declarative domain-specific language for describing the structure of arbitrary binary formats. Based on any specification, KS can automatically generate a ready-to-use parsing module in one of 12 programming languages (C++/STL, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Nim, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust). Serialization is supported in Java and Python.

  This project aims to improve Kaitai Struct through several enhancements. The main goal is to implement full support for 64-bit integers in expressions across all target languages. Currently, results of integer operations often get truncated to 32 bits in JavaScript and statically typed languages. This also causes incorrect parsing in the popular Kaitai Web IDE and may render it unusable for some formats. Another goal is to improve enum handling. This includes ensuring consistent behavior for unknown enum values across languages like Java, Lua, and Nim, enabling full support for 64-bit integers in enums, and introducing a way to add documentation for whole enums in the .ksy specification that appears as a docstring in the generated code. The project also includes dropping support for Python 2 and integrating modern Python 3 features. This will improve performance and code quality.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Kaitai-64bit

Operating Systems, firmware and virtualisation

• Port Phosh to GTK4/libadwaita — Open source user interface for mobile phones

  The Phosh project aims to provide a daily usable, robust and easy to use graphical user environment for mobile devices running mainline Linux.

  The goal of this project is to move the phone shell to the current version 4 of the underlying GUI toolkit GTK. This involves implementing the needed interfaces as well as updating the code base to the changed APIs allowing us to make use of GTKs improvements like GPU rendering and smoother scrolling.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Phosh-GTK4

• allowd — Memory-safe policy rules using D-Bus

  Authentication and authorization are crucial components of a modern Linux system's security. For the desktop Linux environment, Polkit is used as a central authentication and authorization component. But ever since 2012, its policy rules have been based on JavaScript. Requiring a garbage-collected programming language to be started up for the tiny snippets of rules is excessive, especially in resource-constrained environments. We will prototype an alternative approach to the current Polkit daemon, utilizing the existing external D-Bus interfaces, but improving the internal design. We also aim to demonstrate to the Freedesktop community, especially the systemd team, that Rust is well-suited for these core desktop applications, producing small and efficient binaries with limited dependencies.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/allowd

• EcoNet Linux — Add Linux kernel support for EcoNet MIPS processors

  There are millions of Fiber and DSL modems around the world based on the EcoNet processor family. When telecoms upgrade their networks, these devices are discarded as e-waste because they are only supported by an aging and proprietary OS based on Linux 2.6. Most of these devices have 128 to 512MB of memory and often even USB ports, making them even more capable than many pure wifi routers. The EcoNet Linux project is firstly about supporting these EcoNet processors in mainline Linux and OpenWRT so that these devices can have a second life as wifi routers or even small home servers. Secondly, the project aims to make the first headway into open source support for the EPON fiber optic modem component. This will (for the first time) open up the possibility for using open source fiber modems with ISPs deployments as well as for private and community passive fiber optic networks.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Econet-Linux-mainline

• Reproducible bootstrap path for 'Node.js' based on GNU Guix — Build Node.js from source with Guix

  Node.js is used directly or indirectly in the bootstrap path of most modern web browsers. Contemporary versions of Node.js depend on a HTTP parser called llhttp. Building llhttp requires an ECMAScript runtime such as Node.js to generate C sources from a declarative parser specified with TypeScript. This project aims to create a bootstrap path for Node.js in GNU Guix without relying on an existing older version of the Node.js runtime. This approach ensures there won't be an evergrowing list of insecure and unmaintained versions of Node.js required to bootstrap future versions Node.js.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Guix-bootstrap-Node.js

• TrenchBoot - DRTM launch between coreboot and UEFI payload — Protect coreboot payload with dynamic Roots of Trust

  The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Trenchboot-DRTM-launch

• WPA3 support for OpenBSD 802.11 wireless — Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 for OpenBSD

  This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the diversity and resilience of the global IT ecosystem.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/OpenBSD-wifi-WPA3

Measurement, monitoring, analysis and abuse handling

• RA-Sentinel AoA — Direction aware sensing of RF-based attacks

  RA-Sentinel is a small, low-power wide band radio receiver device that automatically detects various malicious attacks on Wifi access points, such as Man in the and Denial of Service attacks. The RA-Sentinel project is designed to protect your home WiFi from unwanted cyber threats. Think of it as a digital watchdog for your internet connection that barks when someone from the outside tries to break in. The device will enhance internet safety for ordinary users by monitoring any Wifi cell. The RA-Sentinel Multi-Channel project aims to enhance the existing RA-Sentinel system by developing a 4-channel, 2.4 GHz RF front-end. This upgrade will enable the system to determine the direction of RF-based attacks. By introducing a multi-channel, phase-coherent reception system, we can estimate the Angle of Arrival (AoA) of incoming signals. This will help identify and locate threats such as jamming, spoofing, or unauthorized transmissions.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/RA-Sentinel-directional

• RA-Sentinel Code Liberation — Royalty free synthesizable Verilog code for signal processing

  RA-Sentinel is a small, low-power wide band radio receiver device that automatically detects various malicious attacks on Wifi access points, such as Man in the Middle and Denial of Service attacks. The RA-Sentinel project is designed to protect your home WiFi from unwanted cyber threats. The RA-Sentinel Code Liberation project replaces hardware-specific "black box" components in RA-Sentinel with fully portable, openly licensed code that anyone can use, modify, and redistribute. The project will lower entry barriers to FPGA development, ensure long-term sustainability free from vendor licensing restrictions and product deprecation, and empower the global community to innovate without costly proprietary constraints. This work directly supports digital sovereignty, inclusive access to technology, and fostering community-driven innovation.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/RA-Sentinel-liberation

Middleware and identity

• Aerogramme 1.0 — Standards-compliant, reliable and secure groupware

  Aerogramme is an open source email server that aims to provide a natively geo-distributed IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV server with high availability guarantees. The vision behind Aerogramme is to allow newer, more diverse, ethical, local email providers to provide the same reliability as current industry behemoths. In this project, we aim to work on the last steps needed to envision first production deployments, with the following three core goals: correctness and reliability, operations, and feature completeness (CardDAV and a Webmail).

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Aerogramme-1.0

Decentralised solutions, including blockchain/distributed ledger

• flohmarkt — Self-hostable web app for creating, sharing and answering classified ads

  Flohmarkt is a solution for creating, sharing and answering classified ads. It strives to be the online equivalent of a classical supermarket bulletin board. It enables anyone to set up a marketplace for connecting private sellers and buyers of second hand items, without reliance on third parties, while interconnecting via the ActivityPub protocol with other instances of Flohmarkt and even with other services on the fediverse. Operators could for example be associations organising clothing-bazaars, interest-groups focussed on very specific kinds of spare-parts, or neighborhood-based sharing communities.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Flohmarkt

Data and AI

• OpenVoiceOS - From Beta to Breakthrough — Free and open, self-hostable source voice assistant

  The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/OpenVoiceOS

Services + Applications (e.g. email, instant messaging, video chat, collaboration)

• Miru Collaborative Video Editor — Local-first video and AR editing

  Miru is a set of web-based tools for media editing on the Web with the aim of allowing the general public to create and share engaging, dynamic image and video content of the quality that's normally only found on centralized, commercial platforms.

  This project develops Miru's video editor to make it capable of creating more engaging short and medium form content in collaborative workflows. This will involve adding support for animated text and images, integrating Miru's AR effects, implementing local-first collaborative editing with CRDTs, and integrating with other social apps and back end platforms.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Collaborative-Miru

• Hubzilla performance improvements — Make Hubzilla more efficient and expand Superblock

  This project will explore and implement profiling tools to help measure and improve the performance of the Hubzilla fediverse server using existing tools, and where necessary, by expanding Hubzilla itself to provide useful performance metrics. The goal is to be better able to flag performance regressions, and to identify performance bottlenecks.

  A second goal of the project is to improve the Superblock addon by adding requested features and fixing reported bugs, as well as allowing non-admin channels to suggest site blocks to the admins.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Hubzilla-Superblock

• GoToSocial performance & connectivity — Advanced moderation and federation features for GoToSocial

  GoToSocial is an ActivityPub social network server, written in Go. It complements existing ActivityPub implementations by providing a lightweight, customizable entryway into decentralized social media hosting. GoToSocial places a high value on ease of deployment and maintenance; this means low system requirements, minimal external dependencies, and clear documentation. GoToSocial empowers self-hosting newcomers to deploy small, personalized instances, from which they connect to others across the Fediverse, using low-powered equipment lying around at home. In this project, the GoToSocial team adds new moderation and federation features to GoToSocial, bringing it towards a version 1.0 release (projected end 2026).

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/GoToSocial-1.0

• PdfDing — Webbased selfhosted PDF manager, viewer and editor

  PdfDing is a web based PDF manager, viewer and editor. It offers a seamless user experience on multiple devices and functionality for sharing PDFs with external users. PDF is an omnipresent file type with users in all walks of life. This project aims to be a free all-in one solution for managing and consuming PDFs while having small resource requirements and offering users control over their data. For this reason it is designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/PdfDing

Vertical use cases, Search, Community

• Drupal ActivityPub Social Recipe — Add ActivityPub capabilities to existing Drupal sites

  The ActivityPub module for Drupal implements the W3C ActivityPub protocol for websites based on this popular website management system. With the module, a website becomes an actual ActivityPub server. People are able to follow content from your site on Mastodon and other federated platforms that support ActivityPub. Responses are possible too (Reply, Like, Announce) - with more to come.

  If you need a client, you can install the Drupal Personal Reader project, which allows you to view and interact with followers from your own Drupal instance. Soon you will also be able to use any (ActivityPub/Mastodon-compatible) client to connect with the in-built API.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Drupal-AP-recipes

• Federating Mirlo — Connecting artists and audiences with ActivityPub

  Mirlo provides a user-friendly space to help artists sell digital music and merch, receive financial support, manage mailing lists, and share with their supporters. The goal of federating Mirlo is to connect more artists with more supporters, towards a resilient and lively ecosystem of audio art. Federating Mirlo also presents an opportunity to improve the self-install story: as Mirlo instances will be able to communicate with one another and connect with the wider fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol, organizations managing their own instance of Mirlo can effortlessly tap into a broader discovery landscape for their artists.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Mirlo

• flohmarkt — Self-hostable web app for creating, sharing and answering classified ads

  Flohmarkt is a solution for creating, sharing and answering classified ads. It strives to be the online equivalent of a classical supermarket bulletin board. It enables anyone to set up a marketplace for connecting private sellers and buyers of second hand items, without reliance on third parties, while interconnecting via the ActivityPub protocol with other instances of Flohmarkt and even with other services on the fediverse. Operators could for example be associations organising clothing-bazaars, interest-groups focussed on very specific kinds of spare-parts, or neighborhood-based sharing communities.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Flohmarkt

• flop! — Automatic generation of optimised time rosters

  flop! is customisable software for cooperative scheduling and automatic timetable generation. It offers a low friction management of educational schedules by betting on cooperation. Each user (educator, student, etc) is encouraged to freely express their preferences and constraints through a large catalog of expressible wishes, designed for exhaustiveness. The best possible timetable is then calculated using MILP (Mixed-Integer Linear Programming) solvers. The generated timetable can be fine-tuned by any educator directly within the interface, without the need for time-consuming exchanges with a supervisor.

  This approach, which improves working conditions for everyone, is made possible by an intuitive interface for expressing preferences and a secure framework with granular permission management, ensuring all constraints to be satisfied at all time. A version dedicated to cooperative professional teams is also under development.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/FlopEDT

• GoActivityPub — Help people develop Fediverse software in Go

  GoActivityPub provides a batteries included suite of modules for making the creation of ActivityPub applications easier for Go developers. It was designed to offer a middle ground between the highly dynamic nature of the Activity-Vocabulary and the constraints of the Go programming language, with emphasis on strong typing, minimal resource footprint and very little "magic". It has distinct components for the vocabulary types and processing of activities, an HTTP client which supports authorizing to servers with both ActivityPub specific and traditional methods, multiple storage backends, and other low level helper modules.

  The current goal is to improve the experience for new developers through better documentation, increased robustness and a stabilized API, while also adding the support for Activity-Vocabulary extensions through code generation.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/GoActivityPub

• Mautic Portability Phase 2 — Portable marketing campaigns for Mautic

  Mautic is an open source marketing automation platform. It helps organizations to better understand their customers throughout their lifecycle, and, combined with what they already know about the customer and how they interact with marketing campaigns, enables full personalization of the digital experience across multiple channels.

  Building on the success of Phase 1 —which facilitated the importing and exporting of campaigns and resources— this project introduces a user-facing interface within a Campaign Library to streamline finding, importing, and exporting campaigns in Mautic. This not only accelerates the deployment of common marketing automation campaigns but also integrates community-submitted templates with those shipped with the core system. This enhancement positions Mautic as a formidable open source competitor to platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, and HubSpot, which offer similar features, such as ActiveCampaign's recipes. Additionally, the library serves as an educational tool, instructing users on best practices related to compliance and workflow management.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Mautic-CampaignLibrary

• Parley — Rich text layout and editing library

  Parley is a Rust library for implementing rich text layout and includes utilities for text selection and editing, as well as font enumeration and fallback through the companion library Fontique. Parley depends on the production-quality text shaping engine HarfRust. This project aims to prove Parley's flexibility through modularity, allowing users to choose the high low-level APIs that are suitable to them and making it easier to implement various layout strategies. Additionally, more layout and bidirectional text features will be implemented, especially targeting web use-cases. Further goals are to improve handling of font loading and font fallback behavior, focusing on performance as well as allowing richer web-style font selectors and fallback.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Parley

• Waytale — Spatially organized 2D social space with video chat

  The space around us impacts us. Different spaces (like your living room, the office, or a café) influences how we perceive others (like dear ones, work colleagues, or strangers) or which behaviours we engage in (like studying, relaxing, or chatting). What if online spaces would better support what we want to do and how we interact with others?

  Waytale provides spatially organised online spaces that can be flexibly designed, customised, and extended. Navigate your avatar intuitively through 2D spaces and discover the interlinked spaces of your friends' friends. Meet people, feel their presence of others in different ways, and engage with the world. Create your personal space and express your creativity with tools matching your skill level. Link your space to others and extend it with functionality like video calling, productivity tools, or games. Self-host your personal instance only requiring minimal technical knowledge and without cost. Stay in control of your data and who you federate with using modern peer-to-peer technology. Share what you know, empower others, and form communities. Are you there?

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Wagtail