142 lines
7 KiB
Text
142 lines
7 KiB
Text
---
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
#### 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.
|
||
|
||
#### 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).
|