---
title: The concept and team
---

## Mission

At robur we strive 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.

Robur is a non-profit endeavour that strives 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

Supporters can make charitable donations to robur, which will be used for
further development and maintainence of software and community infrastructure.

Partners can contract robur to develop prototypes (see example
[projects](/Projects)).  Developed libraries are open sourced under a
permissive license if possible, to be reusable by other interested parties.
The application code itself is 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.

## 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 is a research associate at the University of Cambridge.  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 (using a higher-order separation logic and the theorem prover
Coq).  At the moment he is working on an executable formal model of
TCP/IP which can act as a test validator.

Hannes co-authored a TLS implementation from the grounds up in OCaml, and
contributes to the MirageOS project as a core team member.

### 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).

## Contact

If you want to get in contact with us, write an email to team@robur.io.