130 lines
6.7 KiB
Text
130 lines
6.7 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](/Donate) to robur, which will be used for further
|
||
development and maintainence of software and community infrastructure.
|
||
|
||
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).
|