Bottles, the go-to app for running Windows software on Linux, just landed surprise funding — right as things looked dire.
Hallelujah! Bottles has funding!
It’s been about two week since I told you that the Bottles app that seeks to take the complexity out of running Windows apps on Linux using Wine was slowing down development due to lack of money. At the time a lot of key devs with the project were having to seek full time employment to support their families, greatly reducing the amount of time they could commit to committing to Bottles.
That was bad news, of course, since Bottles has increasingly become the go to app for folks needing to run Windows apps on Linux boxes.
In this case, bad news has been followed by good news. On Monday the project’s founder and lead developer Mirko Brombin announced in a blog that it’s received an NLnet Commons Fund grant through the 2025 Commons Fund.
“This support will help us accelerate our work on the Bottles Next project, bringing a more modern and polished experience to running Windows software on Linux,” he said. “The grant recognizes our efforts to build a better future for running Windows applications on Linux.”
NLnet is a term going back to Unix’s early days that originally meant “Netherlands Network.” It was responsible for funding much of Europe’s early networking infrastructure, enabling Unix machines to communicate and share resources in the formative years of the internet. These days the NLnet is translated to mean Netherland’s Network, a nonprofit that supports projects that contribute to an open, secure, and accessible internet. Officially established in 1989, the project has played a major role in developing the European internet infrastructure by funding free and open source software and research projects.
The amount of the grant hasn’t been made public, but the NLnet Commons Fund typically awards grants ranging from €5,000 to €50,000 ($5,800-$58,000 US) per project, with some larger projects receiving as much as €150,000. The grant is evidently earmarked specifically for the Bottles Next project, which aims to polish and modernize the Bottles platform and make it easier to use.
The 2025 Commons Fund, officially known as the NGI Zero Commons Fund, is an initiative within the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) framework that was established to fund open source projects and digital commons in Europe. The fund is administered by the Dutch NLnet Foundation, but is directly financed by the European Commission (the executive branch of the EU) as part of its strategic investment in “open, trustworthy, resilient, and user-centric” internet technologies.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Great news. However, the headline reads “Bottles App for Running Linux Finds Funding”. For running Linux?