NixOS Foundation participating in EU's Next Generation Internet initiative

Announcements
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We are proud to announce that NixOS Foundation is participating in the European Union’s Next Generation Initiative (NGI) as part of the “NGI Zero” consortium. “NGI Zero” consists of a world class coalition of not-for-profit organizations that will support the researchers and developers with their expertise on security and code quality, accessibility (making technology available to everyone, including people
with disabilities), localisation/internationalisation (to increase language diversity on the internet), packaging and reproducible builds, documentation, responsible disclosure, diversity, community building and more. “NGI Zero” is led by NLnet Foundation, a Dutch non-profit that has been supporting building a free and open Internet for over 20 years and funding development of core Internet technologies.

Between now and 2021 grants will be given to independent researchers and open source developers, with a total of 11.2 million Euro. These projects will be selected through bi-monthly calls (with the next call
starting at February 1 2019). The themes for these calls are “privacy enhancing technologies” and “search and discovery”. Anyone with a good idea fitting one or both of these themes is encouraged to send in a proposal via the “NGI Zero” website. We are certain that the NixOS community can come up with creative ideas. Please note that a proposal does not have to be related to Nix or NixOS (although we would certainly not mind). What is important is that it fits the themes.

In addition, it is a goal of NGI Zero that software created by accepted projects can be used as widely as possible. Concretely, this means that they should be buildable via Nix. Therefore NGI Zero provides a
substantial budget to the NixOS project to build and package accepted projects. If you are interested, please contact us at foundation@nixos.org

For more information about NGI Zero and sending in proposals please
visit NLnet’s website at the following URLs:

https://nlnet.nl/news/2018/20181201-NGIZero.html

https://nlnet.nl/PET/

https://nlnet.nl/discovery/

For those of you going to FOSDEM: NLnet Foundation and people from the European Commission will be at FOSDEM. Eelco will also be at FOSDEM.

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To add some more information, projects improving the Nix ecosystem are valid as long as they support NGI0.

One easy to think of examples here could be, say, improving the CI story. If you think your project might support NGI0, please do reach out!

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The second call just opened, deadline April 1st 2019.

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I’m not sure I understand this. Some projects generally not related to Nix would apply through the NixOS foundation and get support e.g. via jobsets on Hydra.nixos.org? (In addition to direct funding of their work?)

I suppose the foundation can’t e.g. buy a few darwin builders or something similar? Well, with darwin there seems mainly manpower missing, but still, it’s now clearly the most bottle-necked platform on Hydra.nixos.org and the most expensive one to expand.

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Projects (indeed not related to Nix or NixOS) can apply for funding at NLnet Foundation (not NixOS Foundation). We will then help these projects to be packaged for NixOS.

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The third call opened, deadline June 1 2019.

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Do you know rough schedule of future calls, off the top of your head?

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Every two months, for another 2.5 years.

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Third call closes August 1, but no worries, there will be another one after that, closing October 1.

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Fourth call closing on October 1.

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Fifth call closing December 1. Please remember: this is not for NixOS specific projects! Anything that is open source and is either about “privacy enhancing technologies” or “search and discovery” can be submitted!

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The seventh call is closing tomorrow at 12:00 CEST (website still says CET, but this will be fixed). After that the eight call will start.

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Eigth call has started, ending June 1.