OpenSSL Foundation endorses UN Open Source Principles

flags on green grass field in front of United Nations building during daytime

The UN Open Source Principles are a set of eight guidelines designed to promote collaboration and the adoption of open-source technologies within the UN and globally. The OpenSSL Foundation is proud to endorse these principles, which capture our existing ways of working and help raise awareness about the value of open source across industries, geographies, and communities.

The eight principles are:

  1. Open by default: The OpenSSL project has been open source from the very start. In fact, OpenSSL’s predecessor, SSLeay, was created in 1998 as an open source alternative at a time when cryptography from the US was subject to export restrictions.
  2. Contribute back: We encourage active participation in the open source ecosystem and give back to our communities by providing education, technical support, and occasional travel stipends for community members to attend relevant conferences.
  3. Secure by design: The OpenSSL Library is a foundational security building block that has been designed with security in mind from the beginning.
  4. Foster inclusive participation and community building: We believe that data privacy is a fundamental human right and that everyone, everywhere should have access to privacy and security tools.
  5. Design for reusability: The OpenSSL Library is highly portable across a wide variety of platforms giving applications the ability to reuse its security and privacy tools whilst conforming to interoperability standards.
  6. Provide documentation: We provide extensive documentation for the OpenSSL Library. We know that good documentation is critical for keeping the project truly accessible to end-users, integrators, and developers, and we are committed to continuing to add to and improve our documentation.
  7. RISE (recognize, incentivize, support and empower): In the last year, we’ve added a full-time Community Manager to our team, conducted our first user survey, and are proactively working to build a larger, more inclusive, and more engaged community.
  8. Sustain and scale: While the OpenSSL Library is our main area of focus, we also collaborate with other mission-aligned projects like Bouncy Castle and cryptlib. We will continue to scale and evolve in order to keep delivering on our mission of providing security and privacy tools for all.

In February 2025, the UN Open Source Principles were adopted by the UN System Chief Executives Board, the highest-level coordination forum of the United Nations system. Since then, 60 other organizations worldwide have publicly affirmed their support for these principles and formally committed to upholding them. We are proud to be among them and encourage others to review the principles and consider signing on.

Image: Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash