The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...

), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.

History

NLnet's history started in April 1982 with the announcement by Teus Hagen as chairman of a major initiative by the European

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

Users Group (EUUG) to develop and provide network services in Europe under the name EUnet. NLnet was the main node of the EUnetThe start of EUne
Piet Beertema and Teus Hagen
operating out of the Netherlands national center for mathematics and computer science CWI, and played a vital role in spreading first

UUCP UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the pr ...

Hauben, R. & Hauben, J.
On the Early Days of Usenet, the roots of the online cooperative culture
/ref> and later the

ARPAnet The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

throughout Europe,Retrieved from LivingInternet.com
EUnet -- European Network
/ref> earning Hagen and other pioneers a place in the

Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet.

. NLnet also pioneered the world's first dial-in and ISDN infrastructure with full country coverageInternet Hall of Fame website
INTERNET HALL of FAME GLOBAL CONNECTOR Teus Hagen
/ref> by using the signal wiringNetkwesties
25 jaar internet in Nederland
/ref>http://internethalloffame.org/blog/2016/12/07/breaking-rules-break-ground-global-internets-earliest-days Breaking Rules to Break Ground in Global Internet's Earliest Days from the Netherlands rail system owned by

Nederlandse Spoorwegen Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS; ; en, "Dutch Railways") is the principal passenger railway operator in the Netherlands. It is a Dutch state-owned company founded in 1938. The Dutch rail network is one of the busiest in the European Union, and t ...

. NLnet was one of the founders of the AMS-ixAMS-ix.nl
AMS-ix historical timeline
/ref> foundation and the

.nl .nl is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Netherlands. It is one of the most popular ccTLDs with over six million registered .nl domains . When cwi.nl was registered by Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica on 1986-05-01, .nl ...

registry SIDN.SIDN.n
Annual report Stichting Internet Domeinnaamregistratie
/ref> Stichting NLnet was formally established as a ''

Stichting A ''stichting'' () is a Dutch legal entity with limited liability, but no members or share capital, that exists for a specific purpose. This form of entity makes it possible to separate functions of ownership and control. Its use has been pioneered ...

'' (Dutch for foundation) in February 1989. In November 1994 Stichting NLnet created NLnet BV (a Dutch Limited liability corporation or BV) as a commercial operating subsidiary and so incorporated the first Internet service provider in The Netherlands. In 1997 the Internet provision services company was acquired by UUnet,

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

UUNET TECHNOLOGIES ACQUIRES NLNET OF THE NETHERLANDS
/ref> which had just become a subsidiary of MFS.

Uunet and MFS Plan to Merge As Internet Meets Fiber Optics
/ref> MFS was acquired shortly thereafter by

Worldcom MCI, Inc. (subsequently Worldcom and MCI WorldCom) was a telecommunications company. For a time, it was the second largest long-distance telephone company in the United States, after AT&T. Worldcom grew largely by acquiring other telecommunic ...

,http://www.verizon.com/about/news/mfs-worldcom-merger MFS WorldCom merger which then initiated a takeover bid on MCI and later became a subsidiary of

. The acquisition provided Stichting NLnet with an endowment to transform into a grant-making organization, funding the development of Internet network technology and associated Computer Sciences research and development. The foundation is a recognized public benefit organization (in Dutch ANBI) and runs an open call where anyone in the world can submit proposals to improve the Internet,Retrieved from NLnet.nl
What NLnet can do for you
/ref> as well as several thematic fundsNLnet website: Areas of special interest
/ref> such as the Internet Hardening Fund.Retrieved from NLnet.nl
Internet Hardening Fund
/ref> Results are made freely available to the community in the broadest sense, typically under

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies * Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company *Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway * Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...

licenses and through

Internet standards In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow ...

web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of s ...

and the like. NLnet is known for sponsoring open source software and standards work as well as auxiliary activities. Some of the projects that NLnet supports or has supported are

DNSSEC The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) are a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The protoc ...

,https://nlnet.nl/dnssec/ DNSSEC FundInternet Journa
DNSSEC Fund Announced
/ref> the

ODF plugfest The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed wi ...

,ODF Plugfest website
ODF Plugfest website
/ref> the GPL V3 license drafting process,Free Software Foundatio
GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project
/ref> Tor anonymity network,TOR Project blog
The NLnet Foundation funds two projects
/ref> the Parrot virtual machine,

Namecoin Namecoin (Abbreviation: NMC; sign: \mathbb) is a cryptocurrency originally forked from bitcoin software. It uses proof-of-work algorithm. Like bitcoin, it is limited to \mathbb21 million. Namecoin can store data within its own blockchain ...

,Namecoin blog
Namecoin Receives Funding from NLnet Foundation's Internet Hardening Fund
/ref> Jitsi, and Libre-SOC.Libre-SOC websit
Libre-SOC.org
/ref>

External links

References

{{Reflist Internet service providers of the Netherlands Non-profit organisations based in the Netherlands