A couple of months ago we were made aware of the DAPSI project by our dear Michiel of NLnet. DAPSI is one of the projects in the scope of the European Union's Next Generation Internet initiative and it offers funding for projects that research data portability and privacy solutions to give people better control over their personal data.
Seeing this, we realised that Maemo Leste could be a good fit. We managed to write an application and apply to the open call just before the deadline.
A month or so later, we were contacted by the DAPSI team to tell us that our application passed and that we are going to receive funding for the milestones we chose to apply with! Obviously, this is fantastic news for us and it helps us make Maemo Leste sustainable and future proof.
The research we are planning to do in the scope of this grant is very interesting and will bring some much needed features to the Maemo Leste ecosystem. We plan to develop various applets that will seamlessly integrate Tor, Wireguard, and OpenVPN into the system and enable a new layer of security and privacy for our community and users.
Also part of the grant is work on communication integration in via the Telepathy framework. More concretely, in the scope of DAPSI, we will work on supporting various interfaces in the Telepathy framework: XMPP, GNU Jami, Matrix, and Signal messenger.
These should all be able to work with Telepathy as the core, and give us a way to test and develop a generic graphical user interface to all these protocols in Maemo.
Finally, we will develop a system library for interoperable sharing of files which will allow us to transfer and share files through various protocols that the system supports, e.g. the above-mentioned.
We have to say we're very happy about this research we're going to do and hope that it will speed up some much-needed development that needs to happen.
Also, we've gathered enough news to write another update/status post of the current state of Maemo Leste, so you can expect that one soon as well!
As always, you can find us on our mailing list and our IRC channel.