The future of Bouncy Castle - FIPS or bust!

Hi all,

On the eve of our 50th Java release I thought it would be appropriate to 
fill everyone in on a few changes to the way we at Bouncy Castle work.

As a few of you are aware, the core developers and some friends of the 
project set up a not-for-profit association a couple of months ago to 
allow us to capture management of the libraries into a single legal 
entity. I'm pleased to announce that the entity that was set up, Legion 
of the Bouncy Castle Inc., has now been recognised and registered by the 
Australian Government as a charity established for the public benefit, 
and for the benefit of education.

 From our users perspective, the biggest change is that we have 
established certainty that the libraries will always be freely 
available. The biggest change from the project's point of view is that 
we are now able to accept donations in order to help progress 
development. As a few of you are also aware last year some of us started 
a company, Crypto Workshop Pty Ltd, for the purpose of providing 
consulting services and commercial support contracts. This has been 
going okay, and I'm pleased to also say that the upcoming release sees 
the benefit of an additional 20 hours of time spent on the release that 
was actually paid for by our earliest support contracts. However, it has 
become clear that our consulting arm is not something that will allow us 
to undertake major exercises such as FIPS certification, without putting 
at risk the principles we wish this project to continue to be built on, 
such as maintaining it as freely available. This is why attaining 
recognition as a charity and the ability to accept donations, with the 
appropriate oversight implied, is really important to us, and to you, 
our user community.

Which brings me to my next announcement. We're marking these changes by 
having our first fundraiser, and our first target is to meet the costs 
of getting the libraries appropriately certified. We believe we can 
raise this money, but we do know we cannot do it without your help, so 
if you, like us, value the independence of this project, and wish to see 
it continue to provide you with quality open source cryptography, please 
follow the link below to find out how to donate.

https://www.bouncycastle.org/donate/index.cgi

As it is our first fundraiser, we have also been able to get our 
resident cartoonist to provide us with t-shirt artwork allowing us to 
provide donors with a PDF template which will enable you to create an 
official fundraiser t-shirt of your own. Wear it with pride!

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me. On behalf 
of the Legion, I would be grateful if you pass this message on to anyone 
you know would be interested.

Regards,

David