5. The Project's Achievements

Five years have passed since we started to work at the project. OpenCA has been constantly growing and the number and quality of active installations are, today, too many to be mentioned here. We have to state, for clarity, that the project is still evolving and because of this we can only imagine what the future of the project will be. Today the project counts a quite high number of developers, mainly from universities, and contributing users.

The basic principles that have been followed throughout these development years:

Thus most of the project's objectives have been either achieved and yet are still to be achieved. This could be quite a cryptic sentence but it is not. The project has achieved its goals because it helped in searching for solutions about certification problems and issues. For example OpenCA has made possible for some municipalities to deploy services to its citizens and other organizations to develop applications for their customers, we solved many practical problems together with users and developers and we helped in making this technology available for almost everyone. We also contributed to the discussion on the pkix working group about some specific issues like certificates' suspension. Still the project has not yet achieved its goals because much work is needed for this technology to be widely deployed and accepted by users. Many standards and protocols are engineered every day and thus the project still needs active development to be kept up-to-dated.