OpenSSL Funding Proposal

[Marcus Carey]

Some members of the OpenSSL development team are soliciting donations to further their development of the OpenSSL Toolkit and other projects. Why not, solicit investors for money to develop enhanced OpenSSL applications and services that generate revenue? Create an investor mailing list "openssl-investors" to find out if OpenSSL users are willing to invest in a company to develop these applications and services. One of the services should be a Certificate Authority. The web server market consists of 250 ISP’s managing over 14.25 million servers. Only 1.2% of these servers support the SSL protocol. Verisign and Thawte combine issue nearly 82% of the server certificates amounting to roughly $30 million annually in revenue. Another company could capture a large share of the market by making it affordable for ISP operators to issue digital certificates to their clients. Potentially there could be 250 Registration Authorities offering digital certificates signed by the OpenSSL Certificate Authority. To achieve this I am willing to make an investment.   Marcus Carey