...for developers

Developers play a vital role in the purposes of the InternetWide organisation. The architecture and technology that are blogged on InternetWide.org are rolled out as practical ARPA2 projects, all in open source. We maintain a network of open source developers, and will every now initiate projects for which we need their help.

What we are offering

Open Source. Open source development is an incredibly powerful method of development. It avoids the overhead of developing the same solutions over and over, which may be the only way to compete with large-scale commercial operations.

We also observed that open source development works bottom-up, with small innovations on top of other ones, but not always from an architectural viewpoint. This means that open source solutions fail to inspire end users in the same manner as "complete package deals" can.

Open Standards. We are constructing a viable alternative for lock-in services who need to earn an income at the expense of end users and their privacy. Although open standards are widely implemented, they are hardly usable to typical end users. It is our explicit purpose to overcome this by creating packages for domain hosting providers who are currently stuck and fail to migrate beyond the web and email protocols that they started supporting 25 years back.

Architecture for Internet Services. Still, there are fairly solid technological movements that all roughly work in the same direction. For example, LDAP and Kerberos are part of all infrastructure that can accommodate large-scale infrastructures. They offer superb security, a better end user experience and data sharing opportunities. So why not make those facilities available to end users?

Technical requirements are also fairly common. Redundancy and backup, resilience in the face of network outages, distribution of domain service control and an overall attention for privacy and security are commonly heard requirements which the market currently fails to implement.

Since the beginning of 2013, we have constructed an architecture based on all these requirements, and describe them on those pages; some of the documents will be very abstract and general in nature, others dive into nitty-gritty detail; the general purpose is to point into a direction where we can integrate many of the valuable open source components to form a suitable infrastructure to the World.

Development funds. We are actively exploring stakeholders who share the interest that we formulate here at InternetWide, and we are offering them "work packages" that usually exploit generic components from our infrastructure. Such dual-purpose investments mean that the work, once performed, can start to lead its own life and be updated and expanded on.

As a result of this approach, we can sometimes offer jobs to open source developers, to work on something they love and it will serve both the open source movement that we started here and at the same time provide a "work package" that convinces yet another party about the value of open source and open protocols in their purchases.

What we are asking

Join the game. We are asking open source developers to join our movement to construct an architecture for the Internet and its domain hosting facilities. We are asking your feedback on components that are being architectured or described here, or in the concrete ARPA2 projects.

Take requests. Every now and then, we will be able to assign paid jobs to open source developers. Sometimes the choice is obvious, based on quality work that we found on the Internet. In other cases, we may approach a team or group, or even advertise openly for parties interested to take on a task.

Make offers. The work done here is done in tight co-operation with NLnet who has a long track record of funding open source projects. You are always welcome to send funding requests to NLnet and explain it from the angle of interest of the InternetWide organisation. We tend to move in the same directions, so it is not going to hurt your case if you intend to move in that direction too.

Spread the word. You are of course quite welcome to point others to our work. We would love to see more valuable comments and input provided to this project! When we join forces we should be able to fix the Internet!