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macOS Code Signing (withdrawn after payment)
Former awardee: Seth Erfurt / @Subject38 (GitHub)
Apple makes code signing too difficult. Spending the Foundation's money on a macOS developer key is both unfeasible and immoral. The number of hoops to jump through proved insurmountable. If a user wishes to sign MFEK's binaries, similar to how the FFmpeg project deals with Apple, they are free to, but there are no current plans to reinstate this grant.

~~libspiro port~~ (revoked)
This became MFEK/spiro.rlib. Due to the determination that MFEK Foundation Grant № 2, Series of 2022 could not move forward, Seth Erfurt contributed a very useful patch to this which helped get it out of limbo and into production. So we consider the payment rendered originally for № 2–2022 to actually apply to № 3–2022, meaning the Foundation is not out any money.

Bézier Simplification for MFEKpathops (completed)
Honorary awardee: Raph Linus Levien PhD
Levien did his work neither for us nor to satisfy any terms of any of our grants, and perhaps did not know of the existence of a relevant grant in the problem domain he was working on. His work just happened to be exactly what we had been requesting. Offered the face value of the grant via e-mail, he declined graciously.

SILE Variable Fonts Support($5,000) (completed)
Awardee: Khaled Hosny
- Merger did not take place in 2022 but the Foundation considers the bounty complete and has paid out.

~~Visual TrueType Rewrite~~ (withdrawn; see archived bid invite)

SILE OpenType FeatureVariations Support($350) (completed)
Awardee: Khaled Hosny

MFEKglif Additional Pens API (completed)
Awardee: Matthew Blanchard
This work was PR'd to the relevant MFEK repositories in 2022 but not merged into v2 until January 2023 and will not be merged into master by mutual consent until some time in 2023.

Upkeep of the Fediverse instance howlr.me (completed)
Awardee: Lycanthropy LLC

MFEK Serif Greek Expansion (completed)
Awardee: Indestructible Type LLC

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

System administration work: Jitsi Meet instance; Mastodon←→Twitter bridge (in progress)
Awardee: Cleveland Digital Self Defense Collective
Due to an executive error, this grant was listed prematurely. It may be awarded in 2023, but was never paid out and circumstances of Naia Ōkami / at Howlr made awarding it in 2022 impossible. Nonwithstanding the foregoing, the MFEK Foundation Inc. owes CDSDC something, so barring Armageddon they will receive some grant in 2023 if they still want one.

The Four Freedoms of Free Software artwork (completed)
Awardee: LAV (@lilblucat)

end of series

Series of 2023

MFEKglif egui port from Dear ImGui (in progress)
Awardee: Matthew Blanchard

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) — $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) — $1000/month (since 10 May 2022)

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

end of series

Series of 2023

@doctormo (ongoing; continuation from Series of 2022)

@alerque (ongoing; continuation from Series of 2022)

@jonoomph (ongoing; continuation from Series of 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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uid           [ultimate] Modular Font Editor K Foundation, Inc. (Grants department) 
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