Writings on Mission:
This is a discussion page for CAcert's Mission. The Mission itself may be recorded on the Mission Page without any discussion.
It was recognised around 2007 that the Mission was not clear for all, and there were competing versions. Although we have a good sense of Community, sometimes we do find ourselves competing in the basis of different views of the mission.
Feel free to add your thoughts as new or responses to prior thoughts.
2007 Mission Project
The board of 2007 pencilled in a target of updating the Mission. Some work was done, and is now recorded as this below list of alternatives on the Mission Page. The project collected these together:
Mission and/or Vision of the CAcert Community
Our mission and/or Vision is:
- Help our users to secure themselves, OR,
- deliver security to the world, OR,
- Reasonable Security for the Community, OR
- Issue Free Certs!, OR
- Free Community Certificate Authority, OR
Promote awareness and education on computer security through the use of encryption (1).
OK, that's several views of the mission ... it is a future project to choose a long term sustainable mission!
Note that they were originally recorded in the Principles document.
Peter's questions
Peter writes: Question goes back to: what is the mission of CAcert?
- Is it to use CA to enable a world of digital signatures on documents (no, since use of certs for signing is unauthorized).
- Is it to use PKI to enable corporate folks to use and leverage certs to deliver massively scalable remote authorization and access controls?
- Is it to deploy a trust model, so private groups get to do their own X - with the resultant secure connections between folk (assuming folks know how to make secure connections, given authenticated keys).
- Is it thwart the evil (US/UK) mega-companies making money from licensing and brands, by showing open source can make money in an alternative "free will" economy that creates new trust models beyond legal signing?
Others
See ISOC for some other ideas. Also note that the terms Mission and Vision are sometimes used interchangeably.
Team missions like Triage (search for Mission).
"Oophaga mission is free digital certificates in Holland and beyond." (Need ref.)
Early History
This below text was from an early version of the website, 20021122. It is recorded here for historical purposes.
About the CA Cert Project CA Cert was started as an integrated part of the NodeDB.com project, where server encryption and client authentication was implemented as a means of reducing personal information leaks, as people more than likely were connecting via wireless devices, which in most cases are more then easily sniffed. Due to the growing popularity of using this method for Authentication, and the sky rocketing prices on signed certificate services, and a growing concern about existing Certificate Authoritites (CA) starting to charge excessively, and increasing on a yearly basis. This is hopefully where the CA Cert project can come in and offer an alternative, where in most cases things will be automated and free, except in the situations such as server certificate signing, and other services that we feel require proof of ownership. These services may incur a cost recovery charge, this will cover the cost to have a real person ensure you are who you say you are, and you have the right to assert your ownership of that domain. All certificates issued will not have strength restrictions on them, such as paying extra for 128bit strong certificates. You can save yourself on the cost of wildcard certificates as well, once you verify a domain, you can create as many host certificates as you like, it won't ever cost you a cent for the additional certificates.
As well as the above text, the logo included a statement "BECAUSE PRIVACY IS YOUR RIGHT" all in Caps.
