15 June 2001

Doing a bit more work on libglade2. It is still broken, but getting less broken as time goes on. Should get it so that the build completes to keep Sander happy :)

Since we are starting to get a number of functional free web browsers, I had the idea that it might be a good idea to create a Certificate Authority for free software projects and people and get its CA cert preloaded in browsers like Mozilla.

Why do people use CAs like Verisign? Because people trust them (rightly or wrongly), and their certs are preloaded in almost all browsers so users don't see a disturbing dialog pop up when going to the site.

The free software community is probably in a better position to verify the identity of people requesting certificates. A group like Debian which already has a strong web of trust between developers could set up a CA. Requiring that certificate requests be GPG signed by a debian developer who has positively identified the requestor before issuing a certificate might provide a good balance between security and ease of acquiring certificates.

Having the CA certificates preloaded in free browsers such as mozilla, konqueror, etc would place them on an equal footing with the existing CAs. Debian as a CA is just an example, as they already have some of the infrastructure in place for identifying people. It shouldn't be difficult to get CA certs added to free web browser's databases. It probably shouldn't be limited to just free software related CAs either.

Another interesting idea would be to setup (or adopt an existing) alternative root zone that included a number of TLDs related to free software (eg .gnu, .bsd, etc) along with the existing ICANN and country code TLDs. If the major distros shipped their nameservers pointing at this alternative root, those TLDs would be usable (and not just to Linux/BSD boxes -- think about how many windows boxes just forward all DNS requests to a Linux or BSD box for resolution).

Both ideas would take quite a bit to get off the ground, so probably won't happen unless someone is really motivated to do it.