NLnet announces funding for 67 more open-source projects

there is a dedicated fund for taler, that alone explains why there are so many projects. now why there is a fund for that is the real question to ask. i guess the people behind the next generation internet initiative giving money to the foundation thought it is an important topic.

I have a feeling the nlnet fund is bunch of nerds who have autonomy over the budget (ie: they are funding namecoin development). I don’t think they represent either the EU or Netherlands position when it comes to privacy.

I find this a very weird way of formulating this. Even if AI keeps its promises and is the future of computing (hopefully without destroying the environment), should it not be applauded that there are still organizations funding work in non-AI related technology? You can say many things about AI, but a lack of funding is not an issue at all I would say. Meanwhile all that other stuff still needs maintenance and development, or would you consider anything not focussed on AI wasted?

Yeah LLMs/GenAI is the current hype but it's just a tiny fragment of the general landscape.

Also I have applied to ask them to add my project to their NGI Fediversity Fund. Here's what I entered:

1. Proposal Description:

  The Vita FPGA Architecture Subproject is licensed under The VitaSet License.

  The VitaSet License is a permissive license which does not offer any implied warranties and patent grants and does not require the inclusion of this license's text on binary and hardware forms of the source code that is licensed under this license.

  This is to prevent executables and computer chips from wasting resources on including license text, but for source code to keep copyright attribution, so that when source code access gets interrupted, no claim of copyright infringement can be made towards the developers, as the claimant would have the copyright header of this license.

  The Vita FPGA Architecture Verilog files VitaFPGAArchLogicBlock.v and VitaFPGAArchMemoryBlock.v are bugfree.

  Any Vita FPGA Architecture Logic Block can act as though it is an Vita FPGA Architecture Interconnect Block. Thus, any possible truth-table can be expressed with enough Vita FPGA Architecture Logic Blocks, Vita FPGA Architecture Interconnect Blocks and Vita FPGA Architecture Memory Blocks. Thus, any integrated circuit could run on the Vita FPGA Architecture, given enough Vita FPGA Architecture Logic Blocks, Vita FPGA Architecture Interconnect Blocks and Vita FPGA Architecture Memory Blocks are available.

2. Proposal Title:

  Vita FPGA Architecture Chip and Toolchain Investment Proposition

3. Former Contributions to the Open Source Space:

  I am the Founder and CEO of VitaSet LLC.

4. Former and current financial beneficiaries of your project, if any:

  Over $400 have been donated by my relatives to me during late 2023. No other funds have been raised.

5. Are there any open source projects that are similar to yours? List any that you know of that exist.

  https://github.com/efabless/clear - The Open Source FPGA ASIC. A open source Apache 2.0 eFPGA + VexRiscV CPU Chip that only sold a couple hundred physical computer chips before they stopped selling anymore through Tiny-Tapeout. I did not read their source code, my Vita FPGA Architecture was designed exclusively by me entirely from scratch. I have however read the GitHub Issues of the Clear FPGA Project and I see someone asking about the bugginess of the reset circuitry. My Vita FPGA Architecture is bug-free and permissively licensed under an open source license.

6. What Technical Challenges has your project overcome and might overcome in the future? List all that apply.

  Reducing the environmental waste caused by upgrading computer hardware, as simple software updates can be issued to update the FPGA Bitstreams instead of manufacturing new physical computer chips.

  Also, people can take advantage of the Vita FPGA Architecture to code up and use Hardware Accelerated Programs when computer chip transistors stop getting smaller.

7. How compatible is your open source project with the open source ecosystem?

  The Vita FPGA Architecture is synchronous clocked logic with an synchronous reset, so unlike the incompatibility of asynchronous integrated circuits, it will be compatible with the synchronous clocked ecosystem of commercial integrated circuits.

8. Upload your PGP Key (optional):

  https://github.com/VitaSetLLC/VitaSet-LLC-Asymmetric-Cryptographic-Public-Key

Edit: No A.I. was used by me.

Maybe you should make a video explaining what you're working on. I spent a few minutes trying to figure it out and didn't get very far. It's a fork of ... looks like Google Docs, but German, and 25 years old?

(Also it looks like most of the repos haven't been touched in a long time. Which repo is relevant?)

apply. you have nothing to lose, and the bureacracy/burden is very small. I'm a big NLNet fan.

I think the point of funding this stuff is not just to produce projects but also invest in the people building them, and to encourage a more resilient and open internet. So it seems entirely understandable if they'd want to prioritize funding people developing skills to understand and work with certain technologies, over funding people who will mainly send the money to some foreign AI giant for an AI that at any point may be taken away (see Anthropic Fable 5 export restrictions), get some specific use case suddenly restricted or quietly sabotaged (see Anthropic Fable 5 on LLM development), or get its price hiked beyond what's viable for an open-source project.

Also, the prompts and dates is for writing the grant proposal itself, and not for coding. Maybe they receive too many AI generated proposals. It feels rather rude anyway to be asking for 5,000 to 50,000 euros funding for your project if you can't even fill in the six free-form fields yourself.

These grants are for humans writing good old-fashioned free software. If you're looking for someone sponsoring llm-tokens, then NLnet is not the right place.