homepage-data/About

---
title: Concept and team
---

Our mission is to develop robust digital infrastructure. We achieve this goal
by continuous maintenance of permissively licensed (MIT/ISC/BSD) open
source libraries, which are used by various partners and supporters.

We strive to enable more people to run their own digital
infrastructure.  Minimising the executable size of services and cutting down
complexity is crucial to help people to understand the technology.

Rewards (in terms of shirts, money, stickers, hardware, retreats) for
contributors of the open source community are part of the funding plan.
Academic papers and talks at workshops and technical conferences will be
written to document the development and deployment of the technology.
The annual balance will be opened for the public to satisfy transparency what
donations and funding is used for.

### Non-profit company

Robur is part of the [Center for the Cultivation of
Technology](https://techcultivation.org), a charitable non-profit company.

Our budget stems from three pillars: donations from supporters, grants, and
commercial contracts (features or products).  For our mission, it is crucial
that all our developed libraries are permissively licensed and open source.

Supporters can make donations to robur, which will be used for further
development and maintainence of software and community infrastructure.  We plan
to get a donation platform (from our host company) in the second quarter of
2018, which will automatically generates tax-deductible receipts.  If you like
to donate (>YYYY) € now, please get in touch with us and we will manually
process your donation.  We accept bitcoin donations (see
[contact](/Contact)).

Various foundations, research councils, countries, have grants for open source
projects which improve the current state of digital technology.  We keep an eye
on these, and apply where appropriate.  If you want to partner up with a
specific proposal, let us know.

Companies can contract robur to develop prototypes (see example
[projects](/Projects)).  Developed libraries are open sourced under a
permissive license, to be reusable by other interested parties.
The application code itself can be exclusively owned by the funding partner.
Examples include branding, configuration and the concrete composition of libraries.

Negotiable terms include time-limited exclusively licenses, service level
agreements (on-call troubleshooting, running infrastructure, updates), early
access on new development, influencing on the development roadmap.

#### 2018

We start our endeavour in 2018.  Our budget consists at the moment of 6 bitcoin
converted to € and [prototypefund](https://prototypefund.de/project/robur-io/).
We are still looking for funding.  2018 will be our first year, starting with a
team of three, hopefully five at the end of the year.

### Team

#### Catherine

Catherine runs an independent software consultancy from Wisconsin, USA.  She
mostly writes code and tests, and builds tools for doing the same.

She has been a member of technical staff at a famous container company, a
research assistant at a famous English university, lead embedded systems
programmer at an obscure maker of network middleboxes, a network security
analyst at a large utility company, a systems administrator at a graduate space
research department, a sorter of discarded things, and a maker of sandwiches.
She harnesses entropy and fights bitrot.

Catherine has worked extensively on the MirageOS TCP/IP network stack and is a
member of the project's core team.  She managed the release of MirageOS's latest
major version.

In her free time, Catherine enjoys bothering cats, playing board games, and
embroidery.

#### Eva

Eva is an infrastructure software engineer and a researcher.

She studied Applied Computer Science in the Natural Sciences, and developed a typechecker for a compiler of a language for optimization problems. In her PhD project she developed metrics to compare forest data structures, with an application in molecular structure comparison. Working as a postdoc in cancer research on molecular structure prediction, she found her way to Brooklyn and Berlin.

In the US tech industry, she works on infrastructure problems with distributed systems on a large scale with millions of users, developing API infrastructure and search infrastructure, with a focus on stateless systems.

Her Erdős number is 4.

#### Hannes

Hannes enjoys living in Berlin, Germany.  Until end of 2017, he used to be a research
associate at the University of Cambridge in the [rems](https://rems.io) project.
He enjoys to write code, and also travelling and repairing his recumbent
bicycle, and being a barista.

Hannes did his PhD in computer science about [formal verification of imperative
code](https://itu.dk/research/tomeso/) (using a higher-order separation logic
and the theorem prover Coq).  Hannes co-authored [not-quite-so-broken
TLS](https://nqsb.io), a TLS implementation from the grounds up in OCaml, and
contributes to the MirageOS project as a core team member.  He is working on
various projects, including opam signing and
[netsem](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/Netsem/), an executable formal model of
TCP/IP which can act as a test validator.

#### Paul

Paul is an independent IT consultant located in Copenhagen.

Paul has a background in penetration testing, protocol design, applied
cryptography, and architectural IT security system design for customers in
especially the banking, insurance, and pension fund sectors. He has been
consulting on [BPAY integration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPAY) in
Australia, and conducting web and network security assessments for customers
throughout the world.

Lately he has spent the last three years writing OCaml and has been working with
IT security, dev-ops and automated deployment for customers specializing in
Enterprise Resource Planning, Internet of Things, and medical technology.

In his spare time he dabbles in research into similar topics and serialization
frameworks, in addition to the enjoyable pursuit of tabletop roleplaying and
social interactions in smokey pubs - two disciplines that he excels in, but that
have somehow not been of particular interest to paying customers (yet).

#### Martin

Martin has been programming since before programming was trendy, eating [Sharp
SC61860A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1350) machine code for
breakfast since before it was healthy, and using Linux way back when it was
just Linus Torvalds’ glorified terminal emulator.

A founding member of Unikernel Systems (later acquired by Docker), Martin has
been involved in a number of library operating system projects since 2014,
including the [rumprun](http://repo.rumpkernel.org/rumprun) unikernel and
[MirageOS](https://mirage.io/). He is a co-author of
[Solo5](https://github.com/Solo5/solo5), a secure execution environment for
unikernels, and joins robur in 2018 to continue his work towards creating
secure software that “just works” and other ambitious projects.

Martin lives with his family in Bratislava, Slovakia and in his spare time
enjoys hiking, yachting and the arts.