Donation to CAcert

[November 12, 2003] CAcert is a young, non-profit organization. CAcert is based in Sydney Australia since it started in July 2003. CAcert signs and distributes free (public key based) e-mail and service authentication certificates and pgp public keys. As such, these certificates establish a Web of Trust in the Open Source certificate services area.

Several years ago, Thawte initiated a similar approach, but their service is only free for the email certificates used by many browsers. The CAcert initiative goes further, providing non-commercial server certificates signing services by building a Web of Trust community.

The donation of €1,000 is provided by NLnet in order to stimulate free certificates built upon Open Source software (OpenSSL, Open PKI services, etc.), and as such stimulating Web of Trust based certification communities.