NLnet

Last updated
NLnet Foundation
Type Nonprofit organization
Legal status Stichting
PurposeFree Software Network Research and Development in the Domain of Internet technology
Headquarters Amsterdam Science Park
Region served
Worldwide
Membership
Individuals
Website nlnet.nl

The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.

Contents

History

NLnet's history started in April 1982 with the announcement by Teus Hagen as chairman of a major initiative by the European Unix Users Group (EUUG) to develop and provide network services in Europe under the name EUnet. NLnet was the main node of the EUnet [1] operating out of the Netherlands national center for mathematics and computer science CWI, and played a vital role in spreading first UUCP [2] and later the ARPAnet throughout Europe, [3] earning Hagen and other pioneers a place in the Internet Hall of Fame. NLnet also pioneered the world's first dial-in and ISDN infrastructure with full country coverage [4] by using the signal wiring [5] [6] from the Netherlands rail system owned by Nederlandse Spoorwegen. NLnet was one of the founders of the AMS-ix [7] foundation and the .nl registry SIDN. [8]

Stichting NLnet was formally established as a Stichting (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, [9] which had just become a subsidiary of MFS. [10] MFS was acquired shortly thereafter by Worldcom, [11] which then initiated a takeover bid on MCI and later became a subsidiary of Verizon.

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, [12] as well as several thematic funds [13] such as the Internet Hardening Fund. [14] Results are made freely available to the community in the broadest sense, typically under FOSS licenses and through Internet standards, web standards 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, [15] [16] the ODF plugfest, [17] the GPL V3 license drafting process, [18] Tor anonymity network, [19] the Parrot virtual machine, Namecoin, [20] Jitsi, nftables, [21] and Libre-SOC. [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IPv6</span> Version 6 of the Internet Protocol

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless community network</span>

Wireless community networks or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives in order to provide a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CompuServe</span> 1969–2009 American online service provider

CompuServe was an American online service, the first major commercial one in the world. It opened in 1969 as a timesharing and remote access service marketed to corporations. After a successful 1979 venture selling otherwise under-utilized after-hours time to Radio Shack customers, the system was opened to the public, roughly the same time as The Source. H&R Block bought the company in 1980 and began to more aggressively advertise the service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XS4ALL</span>

XS4ALL was an Internet service provider (ISP) in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1993 as an offshoot of the hackers club Hack-Tic by Felipe Rodriquez, Rop Gonggrijp, Paul Jongsma and Cor Bosman, while based in Amsterdam. It was the sixth provider in the Netherlands and the second company to offer Internet access to private individuals. Initially only offering dial-in services via modem and ISDN, it later expanded to offer dial-up access as well as ADSL, VDSL, and fiber-optic (FTTH) services as well as mobile internet. The name is a play on the English pronunciation of access for all.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UUNET</span> Early U.S. Internet service provider

UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the first and largest commercial Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia. Today, UUNET is an internal brand of Verizon Business.

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 protocol provides cryptographic authentication of data, authenticated denial of existence, and data integrity, but not availability or confidentiality.

The Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica is a research centre in the field of mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is part of the institutes organization of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and is located at the Amsterdam Science Park. This institute is famous as the creation site of the programming language Python. It was a founding member of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dirk Jan Struik</span>

Dirk Jan Struik was a Dutch-born American mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the U.S.

The following article details governmental and other organizations from around the world who are in the process of evaluating the suitability of using (adopting) OpenDocument, an open document file format for saving and exchanging office documents that may be edited.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AIDS education and training centers</span>

AIDS, caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has become a global health issue, and various ways are being explored in order to combat the spread of the disease. One such way to somewhat limit the spread of AIDS is through education. Societies with significant number of HIV positive individuals and people that have been diagnosed with having cases of AIDS are societies in which education about the disease is limited to almost non-existent and where culture and tradition clash with modern medicine. Thus, education and training are of great importance and a number of organizations have been formed within the past two decades. Organizations vary from being government funded to private and/or are formed by health and social advocates. Organizations provide range of services from support for families and individuals affected by the disease, classes in academic settings ranging from preschools to universities, available resources to updates on the latest advances in medical treatments.

EUnet was a very loose collaboration of individual European UNIX sites in the 1980s that evolved into the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd in 1996. It was sold to Qwest in 1998. EUnet played a decisive role in the adoption of TCP/IP in Europe beginning in 1988.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet in the United States</span> Overview of the Internet in the United States of America

The Internet in the United States grew out of the ARPANET, a network sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense during the 1960s. The Internet in the United States in turn provided the foundation for the worldwide Internet of today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Kaminsky</span> American computer security researcher (1979–2021)

Daniel Kaminsky was an American computer security researcher. He was a co-founder and chief scientist of Human Security, a computer security company. He previously worked for Cisco, Avaya, and IOActive, where he was the director of penetration testing. The New York Times labeled Kaminsky an "Internet security savior" and "a digital Paul Revere".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usenet</span> Worldwide computer-based distributed discussion system

Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses or copyleft that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.

The Global Network Initiative (GNI) is a non-governmental organization with the dual goals of preventing Internet censorship by authoritarian governments and protecting the Internet privacy rights of individuals. It is sponsored by a coalition of multinational corporations, global non-profit organizations, and academic institutions. David Kaye (academic) is the Independent Chair of the Board. Mark Stephens (solicitor) was the previous Independent Chair.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wouter Tebbens</span>

Wouter Tebbens, is a Dutch activist, researcher and social entrepreneur on Free Knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willemijn Verloop</span> Peace activist

Willemijn Verloop is a Dutch peace activist dedicated to children affected by war, and also the founder of War Child In 2012, she founded Social Enterprise NL, a platform for growing the Social enterprise sector in The Netherlands. In 2013, she founded impact investment fund Rubio Impact Ventures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guardian Project (software)</span>

The Guardian Project is a global collective of software developers, designers, advocates, activists, and trainers who develop open-source mobile security software and operating system enhancements. They also create customized mobile devices to help individuals communicate more freely and protect themselves from intrusion and monitoring. The effort specifically focuses on users who live or work in high-risk situations and who often face constant surveillance and intrusion attempts into their mobile devices and communication streams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in the Netherlands</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in the Netherlands

Scholarly communication of the Netherlands published in open access form can be found by searching the National Academic Research and Collaboration Information System (NARCIS). The web portal was developed in 2004 by the Data Archiving and Networked Services of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

References

  1. The start of EUnet Piet Beertema and Teus Hagen Archived 2016-03-22 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Hauben, R. & Hauben, J., On the Early Days of Usenet, the roots of the online cooperative culture
  3. Retrieved from LivingInternet.com: EUnet -- European Network
  4. Internet Hall of Fame website: INTERNET HALL of FAME GLOBAL CONNECTOR Teus Hagen
  5. Netkwesties: 25 jaar internet in Nederland
  6. 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
  7. AMS-ix.nl: AMS-ix historical timeline
  8. SIDN.nl Annual report Stichting Internet Domeinnaamregistratie
  9. New York Times: UUNET TECHNOLOGIES ACQUIRES NLNET OF THE NETHERLANDS
  10. New York Times: Uunet and MFS Plan to Merge As Internet Meets Fiber Optics
  11. http://www.verizon.com/about/news/mfs-worldcom-merger MFS WorldCom merger
  12. Retrieved from NLnet.nl: What NLnet can do for you
  13. NLnet website: Areas of special interest
  14. Retrieved from NLnet.nl: Internet Hardening Fund
  15. https://nlnet.nl/dnssec/ DNSSEC Fund
  16. Internet Journal DNSSEC Fund Announced
  17. ODF Plugfest website: ODF Plugfest website
  18. Free Software Foundation GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project
  19. TOR Project blog: The NLnet Foundation funds two projects
  20. Namecoin blog: Namecoin Receives Funding from NLnet Foundation's Internet Hardening Fund
  21. "netfilter/iptables project homepage - About the netfilter/iptables project". netfilter.org. Retrieved 2024-02-12.
  22. Libre-SOC website:Libre-SOC.org