In the summer of 1997, the NLNet Foundation sold its commercialized internet provision activities to UUNET (the internet subsidiary of WorldCom). This created a fund from which the foundation now supports activities that provide network technology to the community and keep outcomes in the "public domain". NLnet has picked Identity, Privacy & Presence and Open Document Format as the two main areas it will focus its funding on:
A self-imposed social acceptance of closed formats is sometimes difficult to break through, but with the dominant binary formats of the past being deprecated by their vendors themselves the situation looks very bright.