Fundraising for OpenSSL development
Richard Levitte
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Revision $Id: OpenSSL-funding.html,v 1.4 2004/05/24 11:09:14 levitte
Exp $
Hello OpenSSL users and developpers,
I'm Richard Levitte, an OpenSSL developper.
I've been active in many parts of OpenSSL, most notably in portability
issues, ENGINE, UI, CONF, memory allocation and a number of other
parts I forget, as well as general tinkering when and where needed.
This letter is about raising funds for me to work on parts of OpenSSL
that I initiated or have plans to initiate, more or less full time for
at least three months, and possibly more.
This letter will be kept up to date at
[2]http://www.free.lp.se/OpenSSL-funding.html.
So, what's the deal?
The deal is that I currently find myself a little short on job
assignments except for some short ones, and therefore, my planning
book is more or less empty for the rest of 2004. I would like to be
able to use this opportunity to make a larger contribution to OpenSSL
with some tasks that are bigger than those one can complete on one's
spare time within a reasonable time frame.
The tasks I'm planning on are:
* to complete the STORE library, including the implementaion of a
few STORE accessing ENGINE modules (File, LDAP and a special one
for the nCipher HSM store come in mind, and more may be added),
and have it replace the current X509_LOOKUP mechanism.
* to implement certificate path building that can handle simple
PKIs, hierarchical PKIs, mesh PKIs, hybrid PKIs, using the current
PKIX draft (currently draft-ietf-pkix-certpathbuild-03.txt) as
basic document.
* [OPTIONAL, if time permits] to make configuration easier to
program, and to work toward a unification of all platforms so the
building system looks the same everywhere.
This email is an appeal to the OpenSSL user community to try to raise
money for three or more months of my time to be able to dedicate time
to work on the tasks shown above.
How much money do you need?
SEK 39000 (USD 5200/EUR 4300) per month, minimum 3 months.
It will basically pay for my rent, network connection and food for my
kid and me. This is where my budget balances.
For those who are going to ask anyway: no, this isn't my usual
consulting fee. It's the very best I can offer for my time, and only
applies for doing work of my own choice, such as OpenSSL development.
The amounts are pre-tax. I operate my own registered one-man company
here in Sweden, and I pay approximately 2/3 in taxes (see below). This
means that the net result I end up with is really SEK 13000 (USD
1715/EUR 1425) per month to pay rent and feed my kid and myself.
How do I donate money?
You can transfer money to my PayPal account: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
You can also do a wire transfer, using the following data:
Bank:
Nordea Bank AB
SE-105 71 Stockholm
SWEDEN
SWIFT:
NDEASESS
IBAN:
SE27 9500 0099 6018 0602 1380
Account:
60 21 38-0
Account holder:
Levitte Programming, Richard Levitte
How much or little can I donate?
With PayPal, the lower limit needs to be EUR 1.00. PayPal takes about
4% + EUR 0.35, so to really make a difference, it would be nice if you
could keep to a EUR 10.00 minimum.
Wire transfers and bank checques aren't economically practical for
amounts less that SEK 100/USD 200/EUR 150 due to bank fees.
I encourage people to get together for donations. That way, the
amounts tranfered will be larger, PayPal and the banks make less
money, and you get more of my time out of the donation.
How does it work with taxes?
Since I run this through my company, the donations aren't
tax-deductible. Sorry.
Depending on where you donate from, you may or may not be subject to
sales tax, and will get an invoice or receipt back according to the
following:
Swedish donors
I will send you an invoice/receipt that reports the sales tax
("moms" in Swedish, which is 25%). Companies will have this
refunded through their own invoices, private persons will not.
Donors from the rest of EU
For private persons, the sales tax is 25% (i.e. I will take off
20% from the donated amounts).
For businesses, there is no sales tax, provided you send me
your company's sales tax registration identity. If you are a EU
business sending me money, I will send you an invoice/receipt
that reports 0 sales tax as soon as I receive the money AND the
tax registration identity.
Donors from the rest of the word
No sales tax applies here either. I will send you a signed JPG
or PDF file with my receipt as soon as the money has landed in
my bank account.
Please note that for donations via PayPal, I will do weekly transfers
to my bank, thus reducing the amount of money that goes to PayPal
(they take SEK 7.00 for each such transfer). This means that there may
be a delay of about a week before I can send you a receipt on the
donation.
The rest of the taxes are normal business and income taxes that all
Swedish businesses and businesspeople are subject to, and are not
affected by the origin of donation.
What happens if you don't get funded?
If I don't get enough funds, I'll find other means to pay rent, feed
my kid and myself, and will do the work on my spare time. This means
that it will take a much longer time, and that I will not be able to
focus quite as well on the tasks, since there will be a lot more other
things that will distract me.
If I only get part of the funding, I will have each donor decide what
to do with their donation. Some may want the money back, others may
want me to keep it as an encouragement to keep up the work I do. It's
up to you to choose. I will use whatever remains for some of the time
I spend on OpenSSL.
How are you accountable for the donated money?
I will maintain the full list of donations, including the donors, the
donation sizes, taxes and so on [3]here. I encourage all donors to
check that their donation shows up correctly on that page.
You can donate semi-anonymously, by giving me a nickname for me to use
in the [4]donations page.
What about the rest of the OpenSSL team?
I talked with the rest of the OpenSSL team about rasing money for my
work, and the message from the was clear and simple: "Go for it".
Have I seen this kind of message before?
You may have. I was heavily inspired by [5]Poul-Henning Kamp's appeal
to the FreeBSD community.
_________________________________________________________________
Last modified: Mon May 24 13:09:39 CEST 2004
References
1. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
2. http://www.free.lp.se/OpenSSL-funding.html
3. http://www.free.lp.se/OpenSSL-donations.html
4. http://www.free.lp.se/OpenSSL-donations.html
5. http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html
--
Richard Levitte \ Tunnlandsv�gen 52 \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ S-168 36 BROMMA \ T: +46-708-26 53 44
\ SWEDEN \
Procurator Odiosus Ex Infernis -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Member of the OpenSSL development team: http://www.openssl.org/
Unsolicited commercial email is subject to an archival fee of $400.
See <http://www.stacken.kth.se/~levitte/mail/> for more info.
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