Maho has been selected for NLnet's NGI TALER Fund!
Big news today: Maho has been approved for funding by the NLnet Foundation, as part of the NGI TALER Fund.
This took almost a year of work, from first application to final signature, and it secures more than a year of dedicated Maho development. Maho now has its own project page on nlnet.nl, alongside some of the most respected free software projects in the world.
What is NLnet?
If you've been around free software for a while, you already know the name. The NLnet Foundation is an independent Dutch non-profit that has been funding open source software and open internet technology for decades, and their portfolio reads like a who's who of critical internet infrastructure.
What makes NLnet special is how they fund: no equity, no board seats, no roadmap steering. They find great free software projects, put them through a famously rigorous technical review, and then let them do their best work. Being selected by them is a serious stamp of approval.
What is NGI TALER?
NGI TALER is one of NLnet's theme funds. It supports GNU Taler, an open source privacy-preserving payment system, and the wider ecosystem of free software that digital payments and commerce run on: merchant tooling, integrations, and platforms.
That's where Maho comes in: an open source ecommerce platform that merchants and agencies run on their own infrastructure, with full ownership of their data and operations. A natural fit for a fund focused on keeping commerce technology open.
The fund is financed through the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.
What this means for Maho
- More than a year of funded development: sustained, dedicated time to keep modernizing the codebase, adding new amazing features, and strengthening the platform's long-term sustainability.
- Everything stays free and open source: not just our promise, a condition of the fund itself. Every line of work funded through this grant is released under a free and open source license, for everyone.
- Zero strings attached to your store: this is a grant, not an investment. Maho remains fully independent, and you remain fully in control of your ecommerce.
- Recognition for the mission: NLnet chose to fund Maho because keeping ecommerce infrastructure in the commons matters. It preserves merchant autonomy and reduces dependency on centralized platforms that can change terms, raise prices, or shut down at will.
A year in the making
From the first application to the final signature, the process took quite some time: writing the proposal, detailing the technical plan, answering questions, refining the scope. NLnet's review is famously thorough, and rightly so.
Worth every step. For a project built and maintained with a fraction of the resources of the commercial platforms it competes with, this kind of support changes the game: it turns "we'll get to it when we can" into "it's on the funded roadmap".
Thank you
A huge thank you to the NLnet Foundation team for believing in Maho and for the work they do for the open internet. And, as always, thank you to our community, sponsors and contributors, who kept this project alive and growing to the point where it could earn this recognition.
You'll find the NLnet and NGI TALER logos on our sponsors page from today.
The best is yet to come.
Maho rocks! 🚀