It is wonderful to see the growing number of people working on digital commons, inventing and improving technologies to the benefit of all humanity. 42 of such projects have been selected for funding in the October call of the NGI Zero Commons Fund. In terms of applications, it was the largest call round in NGI Zero’s life time. And we’d like to take this space to thank all applicants for their contributions to an internet for people rather than for profit.

The selected projects all contribute, one way or another, to the mission of the Commons Fund: reclaiming the public nature of the internet. For example, there are people working on MNT Reform Touch (an open hardware tablet device) and the Solar FemtoTX motherboard — a collaborative effort to create an ultra-low power motherboard that can run on solar power. The Open Terms Archive offers public tracking of the evolution of terms and conditions to facilitate democratic oversight. LLM2FPGA aims to enable running open source LLMs locally on FPGAs using a fully open-source toolchain. bcachefs readies itself as the next generation filesystem for Linux, improving performance, scalability and reliability when compared to legacy filesystems and KDE Plasma Gestures will add multi-touch and stroke gestures to the Plasma Desktop. And that’s just a small sample of the wide range of important contributions being worked on. Read on to meet all the projects selected in this funding round.

If you applied for a grant
This is the selection for the October call of the NGI Zero Commons Fund fund only. We always inform all applicants about the outcome of the review ahead of the public announcement, whether they are selected or not. If you have not heard anything, you probably applied to a later call or a different fund that is still under review.

Meet the new projects!

(you can click or tap on the project name to fold out additional information)

Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing

• FuseSoc-compatible Web Catalog — A catalog of gateware that can be easily used with FuseSoC

  FuseSoC is a package manager for chip designs, allowing for easy reuse and sharing of IP cores as well as combining them into larger systems. Its native core description format (CAPI2) allows describing IP cores in a tool- and vendor-independent way. Together with FuseSoC’s backend library Edalize this enables creating and using portable IP cores and SoCs for a large number of EDA tools and flows.

  This project will extend FuseSoC with a collaborative database and a web frontend that allows users to upload their core description files to a central repository to make it easier for others to find and inspect them. In addition, signing, SBOM generation and a web frontend will be added to increase transparency, trust and security.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/FuseSoC-catalog

• MNT Reform Touch — Open Hardware tablet device
• Solar FemtoTX motherboard with 802.3 cg Ethernet cards — Low-power motherboard that can run on solar power

  Solar FemtoTX motherboard with 802.3 cg Ethernet cards is an open, collaborative effort towards designing an ultra-low power motherboard in a mobile device-sized form factor. It aims to achieve several goals: 1) to design a plug and play (PnP) motherboard that can be seamlessly integrated into an open-source hardware laptop for easy repair/replacement/upgrade. 2) to utilize the new, 802.3cg ethernet standard for a low-power LAN port, and 3) to integrate the 802.3 cg ethernet port into a single board computer with a FemtoTX-sized form factor for the lowest power consumption, facilitating minimal solar energy requirements and quick recharging.

  Furthermore, the project aims to make the open-hardware framework extensible by supporting socket-based or embedded processors and peripheral devices that meet a defined size and TDP limit. This interoperability allows newer, ultra low power microprocessors to work within the FemtoTX specification, and is optimized for solar power.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Solar-FemtoTX

• Tin Snipe DAQ — Digital Aquisition module

  The Tin Snipe DAQ is a digital acquisition (DAQ) module targeting diverse professional measurement applications typically found in mid to high end hand-held Multimeters. It focuses on digital mixed signal systems while offering an upgrade over traditional Multimeters in terms of sample rate, giving usable time series data for signal integrity analysis of low speed signals. It’s designed as a compact fully integrated module that comes with the necessary AFE, ADC and Signal Processor. It exposes a digital control interface over various buses (UART, I2C, USB and potentially more) to be controlled and read out via an external system processor, thus making it easy to integrate into other systems. It is targeting battery operation like traditional handheld Multimeters and will be heavily optimized for low power consumption but can also be used for bench top applications.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/TinSnipe-DAQ

• USB 3 PHY implementation on GateMate FPGAs — USB 3 PHY implementation with Cologne Chip GateMate FPGA Transceiver

  Since its introduction at the end of the previous century, USB has developed into the most widely used interface to connect all sorts of electronic devices. Recent versions of the USB standard provide serial communication at speeds of 5Gbps and higher, which require a dedicated hardware block (transceiver) inside a chip. Throughout the last decade, FPGA devices are gaining popularity in many applications and this trend will not stop. Even small and low-cost modern FPGA devices, such as GateMate FPGA from Cologne Chip AG, include transceivers capable of communication at 5Gbps. However, no Open Hardware and FOSS implementation of USB 3.x is available. This project will enable a universal and libre USB 3.2 Gen.1 x1 (5Gbps) connectivity on the GateMate FPGA.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/GateMate-USB3-PHY

Operating Systems, firmware and virtualisation

• SSH Stamp — Secure SSH-to-UART bridge for devices with a serial port

  SSH Stamp is a secure wireless-to-UART bridge implemented in Rust (no_std, no_alloc and no_unsafe whenever possible) with simplicity and robustness as its main design tenets. The firmware runs on a microcontroller running Secure SHell Protocol (RFC 4253 and related IETF standards series). This firmware can be used for multiple purposes, conveniently avoiding physical tethering and securely tunneling traffic via SSH by default: easily add telemetry to a (moving) robot, monitor and operate any (domestic) appliance remotely, conduct remote cybersecurity audits on network gear of a company, reverse engineer hardware and software for right to repair purposes, just to name a few examples -a “low level-to-SSH Swiss army knife”.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/SSH-Stamp/

• Ada Bootstrap Compiler — Full source bootstrap for Ada

  Ada is an important computer language with a long history, with the compilers being built for new architectures in an ad-hoc basis based on previously existing Ada compilers from other architectures. This project aims to create a bootstrap path from the C language to an Ada compiler without relying on an existing Ada compiler binary. This will allow us to have a fully auditable trail from C to a working Ada compiler, removing concerns about hidden backdoors or other issues that may arise from using a compiler without a clear bootstrap path.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Ada-bootstrap

• Bcachefs userspace integration — Next generation filesystem

  bcachefs is a next generation filesystem for Linux, with a fully modern featureset and vastly improved performance, scalability and reliability as compared to legacy filesystems. The main focus of this grant is achieving stability, but on the side there will be work on userspace integration with systemd, reworking the cryptographic API to be more robust, as well as adding the potential for users to generate telemetry data – in order to capture edge cases in the real-world.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/bcachefs-crypto-API

• KDE Plasma Gestures — Advanced customisable gesture input on desktop and mobile

  Plasma Desktop, made by the KDE community, is a powerful free and open source platform that competes with proprietary operating systems. This project will introduce new functionality for multi-touch and stroke gestures. Multi-touch gestures allow a user to easily switch between virtual desktops, or to open Plasma’s Overview mode. They will become customizable, with a wide selection of available desktop actions. Stroke gestures allow drawing shapes to trigger actions, launch apps, and more. They will be introduced into Plasma’s core desktop experience, complete with a configuration page in System Settings. Together, these features will make Plasma Desktop even more productive and intuitive to use.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/KDEPlasma-gestures

• LeanFTL — Flash Translation Layer library for embeddedsystems

  LeanFTL is a “Flash Translation Layer” library targeting embedded systems. An FTL library is needed on all embedded systems to deal with the constraints inherent to flash memories and to be able to resume operations safely after an unexpected loss of power (AKA “tearing events”). LeanFTL aims at being a minimal library easily portable to any MCU and able to manage both internal and external flash memories. LeanFTL goal is to avoid fragmentation by design, this means that fragmentation never occurs no matter the usage pattern. Another important feature is the emulator which allows running LeanFTL on a personal computer, allowing the integrator to provide such an emulator for its firmware. Last but not least, the emulator is able to simulate “tearing events” – this is key to ensure robustness and security of an embedded system. In other words, LeanFTL not only provide the Flash Translation Layer, it also provides a tool for validating it is correctly used, something which is typically lacking even in commercial libraries.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/LeanFTL

• Maemo Leste Daedalus — Improve device coverage and advanced security for mobile Linux distro

  Maemo Leste is a Free and Open Source mobile operating system based on GNU/Linux. The goal of the initiative is to provide a secure and modern mobile operating system that consists only of free software, obeys and respects the users’ privacy and digital rights. Maemo Leste is currently focussing on upgrading and modernising it’s core to the latest Debian and Devuan versions, improving the stability and security of the system as well as widening the array of supported devices.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/MaemoLeste-AppArmour

• Reproducible Builds in the Scala ecosystem — Deterministic builds for software written in Scala

  While open source components can be audited through their open version history, there is no guarantee that any binaries that are distributed actually correspond to those sources. The technique to validate this is known as “Reproducible Builds”: by building the same code on independent infrastructure and verifying the results are identical, you can verify the binary artifacts have not been tampered with. This is useful both for project members who want to verify no malware was inserted via their CI system or developer build machine, and for ‘external’ auditors who can independently verify the project as a whole is not compromised.

  This project intends to improve Reproducible Builds for software written in the Scala language, which typically use the ‘sbt’ build tool. It will do so by making improvements to the sbt-reproducible-builds sbt plugin and other toolchain components such as sbt plugins and the Scala compiler, so that projects will be reproducible ‘out of the box’ as much as possible.

  ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/ReproducibleSBT

Measurement, monitoring, analysis and abuse handling

• Alaveteli GDPR and Search — Better search and redacting capabilities for Alaveteli FOI request portal

  Alaveteli is an open source platform deployed in 20+ countries that helps citizens make Freedom of Information requests and publishes them and the responses online. Access to Infor