Programme Thesis
NLnet Foundation provides equity-free grants for open-source internet infrastructure projects that serve the public good, funded by an endowment and EU's Next Generation Internet programme. It exists to support foundational protocols, tools, and libraries that improve privacy, security, decentralization, and resilience of the internet, without requiring commercial viability or growth metrics.
Selection Criteria
- Open-source licensing (FOSS) and public-benefit orientation
- Technical feasibility and clear deliverables/milestones
- Alignment with internet infrastructure (plumbing, not applications)
- Potential for broad, long-term positive impact on the internet ecosystem
- Applicant's track record and ability to execute (code repositories, prior work)
- No requirement for market size or monetization plan; public benefit is key
Past Winners / Cohort Profiles
- Projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, WireGuard, Tor, Namecoin, Jitsi, nftables, GNUnet, NoScript, CryptPad, and DNS infrastructure (NSD, Unbound, OpenDNSSEC)
- Typically small teams or individual maintainers building core protocols, resolvers, privacy tools, or decentralized services
- Archetype: a developer or small team with a working prototype or established open-source project that solves a clear internet infrastructure problem
Ideal Candidate Fingerprint
An independent developer or small team with a proven open-source project that directly improves internet privacy, security, or decentralization. The applicant should have a working codebase, clear technical roadmap, and a track record of public-benefit contributions. The project must be infrastructure-level (protocol, library, tool) rather than a consumer app or biomedical product.
Recommended Framing
Eniola should frame his application around the open-source platforms (IMPRINT, TOPOLOGIX, GATE) as computational infrastructure for addiction research, emphasizing their FOSS licensing, modular design, and potential to enable reproducible, privacy-preserving health data analysis at internet scale. The CCT model can be positioned as the scientific motivation, but the grant request must focus on developing and hardening the software tools themselves—e.g., making TOPOLOGIX a general-purpose TDA library for drug safety screening, or GATE a reusable BCI safety evaluation framework—with clear deliverables, milestones, and public-benefit impact for the open-source community.
Watch Out
The core CCT research is pharmacological/neuroscientific, not internet infrastructure. NLnet typically funds plumbing (protocols, resolvers, privacy tools) rather than biomedical models. Eniola must ensure the proposal is explicitly about the open-source software platforms and their infrastructure role, not the addiction biology. Also, NLnet grants are modest (€5K–€50K) and may not cover the full scope of a multi-platform project; a focused, single-tool proposal is safer.