A new mission and logo to highlight our distinct focus

The OpenSSL Foundation has been operating as an independent entity for a little over a year, and in that time we’ve made great strides in establishing our unique place in the OpenSSL ecosystem. Recently, we published a Foundation mission and launched a new logo, all with the goal of helping everyone better understand the Foundation’s role within the larger OpenSSL ecosystem.

You may already be familiar with the OpenSSL Mission, an overarching belief that is shared by everyone involved with the OpenSSL project, from us at the Foundation, to our friends at the OpenSSL Corporation, other OpenSSL Projects, and all of our communities. This project mission states: “We believe everyone should have access to security and privacy tools, whoever they are, wherever they are or whatever their personal beliefs are, as a fundamental human right.”

That mission expresses a belief we share with all the other players in this OpenSSL ecosystem. Yet, each organization has a different role to play.

Our new Foundation mission highlights our unique role: “The OpenSSL Foundation works to ensure that everyone, including nonprofits, academics, and independent developers, has access to fundamental data privacy and security tools that are the backbone of internet protection, quietly safeguarding millions of users. We do this to help build a safer internet – one that serves the public interest and upholds privacy and security as foundational rights.”

This mission highlights what sets us apart as the Foundation – our focus on serving nonprofits, academics, and independent developers. We do this through our engineering work on the OpenSSL Library, as well as through supporting and educating our community, collaborating with other organizations, and creating awareness of data privacy and security in the broader open source software community.

Together with the Foundation mission, we’ve rolled out a new logo. It maintains the signature “OpenSSL” look but puts a bigger emphasis on the Foundation part of our name. The new mark takes its inspiration from math, where a double-stroke F indicates a set of numbers. It’s about the collective, the expansive group of all people, everywhere, who rely on the OpenSSL Foundation’s work for their privacy and security.

We know that the OpenSSL ecosystem has a lot of players, and we hope these changes help people better understand our unique role as a non-profit Foundation within that ecosystem. But we’re not done just yet.

Over the next few months, we’ll be working on a website redesign that will better align with our new identity. We want our website to be friendlier and more personal. And, critically, we want it to convey our mission and impact to anyone who cares about data privacy and security, whether or not you understand OpenSSL software. We look forward to rolling out these new changes and launching the new website in the new year. Stay tuned!