---
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

#### 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.

#### Martin

[Martin](https://lucina.net/) 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.

#### Mindy

[Mindy](https://somerandomidiot.com) ran the first MirageOS unikernel in the
public cloud in 2014. Mindy has worked extensively on the MirageOS TCP/IP
network stack and various protocol implementations, and is a member of the
project's core team.  She managed the release of MirageOS's 
[latest major version](https://mirage.io/blog/announcing-mirage-30-release).

Mindy is interested in freeing software from unnecessary dependencies, including
monolithic kernels.  While she finds testing and bug-fixing rewarding, her true
goal is to apply techniques that remove entire bug classes to broader classes of
computation.  Memory safety isn't just for application code!

In her free time, Mindy enjoys bothering cats, playing board games, riding
bicycles, and embroidery.  She lives in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin
in the United States.

#### 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).