Thank you for your interest in bidding on a grant offered by the MFEK Foundation, Inc. Your bid’s terms are defined by the state of this page on the date we accepted your bid. Please keep it for your records. This is version 1 (0-indexed).

TL;DR: How to bid

Please send bids to grants@mfek.org. Please at least attach a description of your relevant experience, your bid total, your full legal name, your country of residence, a corporate identity if you wish us to pay one, your preferred method of communication among this list: email; Twitter; and Discord, and the method by which you wish to be paid.

Full terms follow:

Definitions

The “Foundation” refers to the Modular Font Editor K Foundation, Inc., a New Jersey Non-Profit Corporation, registration 0450797197. It is governed by the laws of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the United States of America.
“Awardee” refers to any recipient of payments from the Foundation.
“Grants” refer to written, digitally signed (GnuPG-signed) offers of payment by the Foundation to a specific Awardee or, in rare instances, multiple Awardees, if clearly stipulated in the Grant.
“Bids” refer to messages from possible Awardees expressing their intent to fulfill a grant offered by the Foundation.
“Foreign Grant” refers to any contract made with another entity for the same work as Awardee agrees to do for the Foundation.
“Platform-managed Crowdfunding” refers to the raising of funds from the general public via platforms for this purpose outside of either the Foundation’s, or Awardee’s, direct control. Examples are GoFundMe and Indiegogo.
“Awardee-managed Crowdfunding” refers to the Awardee soliciting funds from the genereal public via a method under their control, such as bank transfer or cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero) receipt.
“Bounties” refer to a special type of Grant where the Awardee is unknown to the Foundation until they present the work to the Foundation — they solicit their Award from the foundation after the work, and not before. Only the first to succeed receives an Award.

Payments

The Modular Font Editor K Foundation, Inc. accepts bids from any software developer worldwide with whom it can legally contract (must be above the age of 18, must not be from e.g. North Korea, etc.). Payment can be arranged via SWIFT bank transfer, US domestic ACH (the “Automated Clearing House”), mailed check, CashApp, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Monero. No PayPal, ever.

Bid acceptance

Bids may be declined for any or no reason, even if they meet our minimum, at the sole discretion of the Foundation’s chairman as advised by the Foundation’s Board. The Foundation is more likely to reject your bid if it thinks you have no relevant experience, so please include information about your experience in your bid.

Payment schedule

All of our grants have an expected time to completion and a payout schedule. This is flexible. If you demonstrate the problem to be harder than we thought, it is possible that we will agree to pay you more than you bid, once again, at our discretion.

Bid reissuance / revocation

If a grant goes one month without any bids, the grant may be reissued under the same number. The price may or may not be increased. Typically we do not revoke grants unless the Board (in practice, the chairman himself) plans to do the work, and will leave the grant open for as long as it takes to get a bid.

Solicitation of invitations to bid

If it is particularly difficult to fill a bid, we may hire a project manager to go on freelancing websites to try to fill the bid — or the chairman might do that himself. So please bid early. We will consider a bid filled this way as just as legitimate as any other bid.

We may also advertise our bid invitations. Typically, the longer it takes to fill, the more we will advertise.

Grant contents

All of our grants that have invitations to bid attached include a list of features that the software must have for the Foundation to consider the grant complete. Please email if there is any confusion.

Bid process

Bids must be sent either to grants@mfek.org or to copypaste@kittens.ph (deprecated, please use other email unless error received). Please at least attach a description of your relevant experience, your bid total, your full legal name, your country of residence, a corporate identity if you wish us to pay one, your preferred method of communication among this list: email; Twitter; and Discord, and the method by which you wish to be paid.

Bid licensing

You must release any software or digital file you create under a Foundation grant, unless agreed to otherwise (e.g. the Foundation sponsors improvement to existing differently licensed software) under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License. The Apache 2.0 license requires verbatim license file redistribution and this statement cannot be rescinded. Any fonts created under our grants must be dual licensed Apache 2.0 and SIL Open Font License v1.1.

License statement

In the LICENSE file, you must add “Support for this software’s development was paid for by Fredrick R. Brennan’s Modular Font Editor K Foundation, Inc.”, if not agreed to otherwise or amended by any other clause in these Terms.

Our terms and Foreign Grants

Foreign Grants affect our terms in only one major way: if the Awardee can prove that the Foundation’s grant did not supply 60% or more of the total funding for the project described in its Grant offer, via verified receipts from Platform-managed Crowdfunding, Awardee-managed Crowdfunding, or the foreign Grants themselves (the Foundation will sign an NDA with you if necessary for you to disclose the total of a foreign Grant if it is secret), we will rescind the clause in the § “License statement” for your Grant in writing. The Foundation will only accept requests for this rescission of its § “License statement” clause up to 14 days after it pays the total due for your Grant. This 14 days can be extended by written request to 21 days.

Clarifications regarding Foreign Grants

If a Foreign Grantor demands a different license than the MFEK Foundation does (Apache 2.0), this situation is not fatal to your acceptance of both grants. In this extraordinary situation, as long as their license is OSI-approved, the Foundation will consider waiving the entire § “Bid licensing” for your Grant. The Foundation may not do this post hoc and must reissue the Grant to do it. The Foundation will not do this unless the Foreign Grantor is chipping in significantly.

If a Foreign Grantor demands dual-licensing with a different license than the MFEK Foundation’s preferred license (Apache 2.0), this can be agreed to post hoc, but still requires negotiation between us and the foreign organization.

Individual awardees must not promise dual-licensing to their crowdfunding participants (either Awardee-managed or Platform-managed) without seeking an exception with the Foundation in the same way a Foreign Grantor must.