The NLnet Foundation, on behalf of the NGI Zero coalition, announced on 15 October 2026 that 47 new projects were awarded grants in the twelfth open call of the NGI Zero Commons Fund, whose deadline was April 2026. The round spans the stack: KiCad FEM for physical simulation of printed circuit boards, Verilog-A device libraries for Open PDKs to speed fab-independent open chip design, a 1 kW open-hardware wind turbine (Windkit), a Power ISA desktop board, pdsink for USB Power Delivery on embedded devices, a C bootstrapping C compiler, a reproducible Scala bootstrap in Guix, the BabelBuild recursive build system, GNUnet’s post-quantum migration, roughly 2,000 ready-to-use AppArmor profiles in apparmor.d, a Reticulum Rust daemon, and federated social and e-commerce tooling. Because all outcomes are free and open source, the foundation says anyone can use, study, share and moderate them, providing building blocks for digital autonomy. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission; the next deadline is 3 November 2026.
47 Open Source Projects Receive NLnet Grants to Boost Digital Autonomy
The NLnet Foundation, on behalf of the NGI Zero coalition, announced on 15 October 2026 that 47 new projects were awarded grants in the twelfth open call of the NGI Zero Commons Fund, whose deadline was April 2026. The round spans the stack: KiCad FEM for physical simulation of printed circuit boards, Verilog-A device libraries for Open PDKs to speed fab-independent open chip design, a 1 kW open-hardware wind turbine (Windkit), a Power ISA desktop board, pdsink for USB Power Delivery on embedded devices, a C bootstrapping C compiler, a reproducible Scala bootstrap in Guix, the BabelBuild recursive build system, GNUnet's post-quantum migration, roughly 2,000 ready-to-use AppArmor profiles in apparmor.d, a Reticulum Rust daemon, and federated social and e-commerce tooling. Because all outcomes are free and open source, the foundation says anyone can use, study, share and moderate them, providing building blocks for digital autonomy. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission; the next deadline is 3 November 2026.
Source: Nlnet