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Fascinating! My involvement in this space starts much later, so it’s always interesting to hear from folks involved at the time. The rumours about monetizing th
by mcpherrinm 27d ago
Fascinating! My involvement in this space starts much later, so it’s always interesting to hear from folks involved at the time. The rumours about monetizing the root program is one I’ve heard repeated but never anything concrete.
These days with the CA/Browser forum, CCADB, and openly run root programs from Mozilla, Chrome and others, this is all much better documented than what went on in the early days, so I definitely have some strong historical interest in what came before.
- pseudohadamard 26d agoAt the time there were two root programs, Microsoft's and Netscape's. To get into them, for Microsoft you had to go through a painful third-party audit process, SAS 70 from memory, for Netscape you turned up in Mountain View with a suitcase full of cash (this was the informal description of the process). It cost about the same for both programs, again from memory $0.5M each.
- hnmullany 26d agoFor 4.51, it was $100k per cert slot. We were just trying to cover the cost of the engineering team.