Saluton!

The Modular Font Editor K Foundation Inc., 0450797197, d/b/a the MFEK Foundation, is a New Jersey non-profit headquartered in Atlantic City.

Its current chairman is Fredrick R. Brennan <copypaste@kittens.ph>.

Among its assets are the domain mfek.org, which this site is on!

The Foundation has a target budget of $100,000 yearly on fonts-related software. Please check back for grant announcements—this website is frequently updated.

All Foundation-sponsored software is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Foundation-sponsored fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

Grants

Below are all grants the foundation has given out in the service of free software. If you have an idea you want funded send proposals to Fred. Proposals may not be accepted; proposals having nothing to do with libre fonts software will be ignored.

In the below list, a grant is considered reassigned if it originally had one author but was not completed. A grant is considered revoked if the Foundation’s chairman (Fred) does the work himself.

To refer to one of our grants use the style «MFEK Foundation Grant X, Series of YYYY». Grant numbers are immutable.

If a grant’s index is preceded by modifier letter small b, U+1D47 ᵇ, it means that the grant was awarded via bounty, not traditional bid/counterbid negotiation.

Series of 2021 (pre-Foundation)

MFEKstroke (completed)
Awardee: Matthew Blanchard

end of series

Series of 2022

CUDA Vanity Monero Address Generator (completed)
Awardee: Sergey Chernykh (Сергей Черных) / @sech1 (Libera IRC)

MFEK Serif Font (completed)
Awardee: Indestructible Type LLC

macOS Code Signing (at least for MFEKglif) (in progress)
Awardee: Seth / @Subject38 (GitHub)

libspiro port (in limbo)

~~Bézier Simplification for MFEKpathops~~ (revoked)

SILE Variable Fonts Support($5,000) (in progress; check link for details & discussion)

~~Visual TrueType Rewrite~~ (withdrawn; see archived bid invite)

SILE OpenType FeatureVariations Support($350) (in progress; check link for details & discussion)

MFEKglif Additional Pens API (due in December 1^st)
Awardee: Matthew Blanchard

System administration services for BITMAPFONTS.ORG & Mastodon←→Twitter bridge for @MFEKglif (&c.) (in progress)
Awardee: Lycanthropy LLC

MFEK Serif Greek Expansion (in progress)
Awardee: Indestructible Type LLC

egui_skia.rlib v1.0 (SDL2, OpenGL, Vulkan) (in progress)
Awardee: Lucas Meurer
- Stretch goal.

Donations

Besides its grants, the Foundation also makes charitable contributions to developers with no expectation of tangible return, because it believes the intangible benefits to libre fonts of these donations are worth it.

As grants, these payments may be referred to as «MFEK Foundation Donation X, Series of YYYY», though there should be less reason to do so.

Series of 2022

Unicode Consortium — Adopt-a-Character (Gold): U+0051 ‹Q› — $5,000

Martin Owens (Inkscape developer @doctormo) (Patreon) — ongoing @ $1000/month (for February $300; since 1 March 2022)

Donk Enby (as part of a fundraising campaign run by DDoS Secrets) — €1,081.72

Caleb Maclennan (SILE developer @alerque) (GitHub) — ongoing @ $1000/month (since 10 May 2022)

Jonathon Thomas / OpenShot Studios, LLC (OpenShot developer @jonoomph) (Patreon) — ongoing @ $1000/month (since 24 July 2022)

GnuPG keys

So far there is only one GnuPG key in use, for signing certain grants and bounty proposals—

Grants department

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