NGI Fediversity Fund

This page contains a concise overview of projects funded by NLnet foundation that belong to NGI Fediversity Fund (see the thematic index). There is more information available on each of the projects listed on this page - all you need to do is click on the title or the link at the bottom of the section on each project to read more. If a description on this page is a bit technical and terse, don't despair — the dedicated page will have a more user-friendly description that should be intelligible for 'normal' people as well. If you cannot find a specific project you are looking for, please check the alphabetic index or just search for it (or search for a specific keyword).

Our software supply chains are a silent miracle, the result of millions of hours spent every year packaging, compiling and distributing software. From this vast firehose of bits come the apps and services we depend on every day. Subsequently, billions of hours are spent by users on dealing with everything from simple updates to complex system administration. This vast effort is necessary to keep oneself abreast of the never-ending supply of potential vulnerabilities that arrives with just a slight delay. Users that fail to responsively track new releases of every deployed service and each of its dependencies, are bound to land themselves or others in trouble sooner rather than later.

Deploying internet based services is much tougher than we can afford. No matter how user friendly or well-written software is, enabling the community at large to maintain internet services by themselves at scale has proven to be consistently challenging. Achieving high availability scenario's is even more of a dark art. No wonder, people just give in and surrender their data.

Fediversity is a comprehensive effort to bring easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. The programme is part of the Next Generation Internet initiative, which focuses on the development and maintenance of internet commons that support the vision of a resilient, trustworthy and sustainably open technology stack that empowers users, and grants everyone full autonomy.

Fediversity wants to provide everyone with high-quality, secure IT systems for everyday use. Without tracking, without exploitation, in a way that runs everywhere and scales effortlessly. Fediversity is based on NixOS, a disruptive Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, NixOS is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages. Because it is reproducible, it is ideally suited for complex deployment scenario's where consistent behaviour, stability and configurability matter.

All project results become available under a free and open source license so you will be able to study, use, modify and share everything with anyone you want! And even better: part of NGI Fediversity is a supporting grant programme through NLnet, through which auxiliary efforts can be funded. This means that if you are interested in the project, you can be part of it still. Do you have a project idea that complements, strenghtens or otherwise will benefit Fediversity? Why not put in a proposal yourself, calls are currently open!

Applications are still open, you can apply today.