There was a question on Hacker News about how much funding the NixOS Foundation is getting via NGI Zero. Fortunately it’s public money and we don’t have to keep secrets!
Reality is a bit messy though, so bear with me to get a somewhat accurate idea of what’s going on. NLnet handles multiple NGI grants, each with different budgets and runtimes, and the NixOS Foundation gets a slice of them in order to play a support role in the NGI Zero consortium. Our mission for all of these grants is the same:
To onboard new developers, service providers and end users, projects need both an up-to-date development & testing environment as well as turn-key software packages for deployment. […] We package all funded projects in a declarative, transparent and verifiable way. NGI Zero and the Nix community will also help organise three editions of the Summer of Nix. With Nix packaging applied horizontally across all NGI Zero programmes, this common packaging approach offers a smooth and efficient pathway to deployment.
There are rather fancy accounting rules for how that money can be spent. For instance, we can only use money from each grant to support projects funded through that grant. The main distinction is that there are “direct costs”, which are to be spent on implementing our objectives (including project management or travel expenses), and “indirect costs” that can be used to run the foundation (such as expenses for accounting services or general infrastructure).
| Grant | Run time | Direct costs | Indirect costs | Total budget |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NGI0 Entrust | 2022-08-01 → 2025-07-31 | 103 500 EUR | 25 875 EUR | 129 375 EUR |
| NGI0 Review | 2022-08-01 → 2025-07-31 | 79 350 EUR | 19 837 EUR | 99 187 EUR |
| NGI0 Core | 2023-01-01 → 2025-12-31 | 93 150 EUR | 23 288 EUR | 116 438 EUR |
| NGI0 Commons | 2024-01-01 → 2027-07-30 | 213 900 EUR | 53 475 EUR | 267 375 EUR |
| Total | 2022-08-01 → 2027-07-30 | 479 900 EUR | 122 475 EUR | 612 375 EUR |
This means, on average we have 95 980 EUR per year for things like Summer of Nix, and 24 495 EUR per year for indirectly related overhead costs.
At the time of writing, we have used 177 000 EUR for “direct costs”, which means 36% spent at 50% of the run time. One of the reasons was a substantially lower spending than planned in 2024. With the new team setup we’ll quickly catch up this year.
Check our regular updates for progress reports!