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
The goal of the NGI Zero Commons Fund is to reclaim the public nature of the internet. It is the widest in scope of the active funds and supports projects that help to deliver, mature and scale new and existing internet commons across the whole technology spectrum.
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 specifically aimed at creating 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 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.