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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what NLnet's involvement is? It says it's a french initiative and, clicking through, all I can find it that they "partnered", but it doesn't say if they provide part of the money or how this collaboration works:

> The French public administration is rewarding maintainers of critical Free Software that it uses. Its Free Software unit (an OSPO) has partnered with NLnet to put four notable projects in the spotlight and award them the BlueHats 2024 prizes.

(For those not familiar with NLnet, they fund a lot of cool stuff. Picking a random one I like from the list of currently funded projects as an example: https://nlnet.nl/project/CryptPad-Blueprints/)

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As you say, NLnet funds many projects. We (I work there) started off doing so decades ago from our own resources as the first ISP in the Netherlands. These days, most of the funds are provided by the EU, governments and donations. They ask NLnet to handle the applications and guide the selected projects in achieving the benefit for the users of the internet that were touted when the project applied for funding.

The BlueHats prize is different. It's a recognition for past achievements for FOSS projects that are not widely known by laymen, but are indispensable in the functioning of ICT in government.

DINUM is partnering with NLnet for their expertise and to have wider reach for getting nominations and publicity.

> for their expertise and to have wider reach for getting nominations and publicity.

Got it, thanks for the answer! And hats off to you and your colleagues :)

> These days, most of the funds are provided by the EU, governments and donations

Donations sounds to me like either individuals or one-offs, but isn't it the case that various organizations send their profit to you per their bylaws? I'm thinking of places like SIDN and RadicallyOpenSecurity. Do you mean those by donations?

We helped organizing the prize. BlueHats are civil servants who promote free and open source in public institutions. French BlueHats wanted to place FOSS maintainers in the spotlight because, as is well known, too few resources go that way. So they partnered with us to organize the prize together.

Thanks for creating an account just to answer my question! Appreciated. And welcome to the dark side, although I hear HN does not have too many cookies :-)

Hi, I'm in charge of code.gouv.fr and I initiated this BlueHats prize.

The money comes from the French government (4x10K€ for the four prizes).

We wanted to do this with NLnet to benefit from their experience and to rely on another entity to transfer the funds.

We received a lot of interesting submissions and asking public administrations who deserves the award is already a very nice exercise. We will write more about the process and the lessons learned after this first (experimental) iteration.

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