124 lines
6.1 KiB
Text
124 lines
6.1 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.
|
|
|
|
#### 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).
|