As we touched on in our first blog post highlighting ten years of Let’s Encrypt: Just as remarkable to us as the technical innovations behind proliferating TLS at scale is, so too is the sustained generosity we have benefited from throughout our first decade.
With that sense of gratitude top of mind, we are proud to announce a contribution of $1,000,000 from Jeff Atwood. Jeff has been a longtime supporter of our work, beginning many years ago with Discourse providing our community forum pro bono; something Discourse still provides to this day. As best we can tell, our forum has helped hundreds of thousands of people get up and running with Let’s Encrypt—an impact that has helped billions of people use an Internet that’s more secure and privacy-respecting thanks to widely adopted TLS.
When we first spoke with Jeff about the road ahead for Let’s Encrypt back in 2023, we knew a few things wouldn’t change no matter how the Internet changes over the next decade:
We’re proud that Jeff not only agrees, but has chosen to support us in such a meaningful way. In discussing how Jeff might want us to best celebrate his generosity and recognize his commitment to our work, he shared:
Let's Encrypt is a golden example of how creating inalienable good is possible with the right approach and the right values. And while I'm excited about the work Let's Encrypt has done, I am eager to see their work continue to keep up with the growing Web; to sustain encryption for everybody at Internet scale. To do so is going to take more than me—it's going to take a community of people committed to this work. I am confident Let's Encrypt is a project that deserves all of our support, in ways both large and small.
Indeed, this contribution is significant because of its scale, but more importantly because of its signal: a signal that supporting the not-so-glamorous but oh-so-nerdy work of encryption at scale matters to the lives of billions of people every day; a signal that supporting free privacy and security afforded by TLS for all of the Internet’s five billion users just makes sense.
Ten years ago we set out to build a better Internet through easy to use TLS. If you or your organization have supported us throughout the years, thank you for joining Jeff in believing in the work of Let’s Encrypt. For a deeper dive into the impact of Let’s Encrypt and ISRG’s other projects, take a look at our most recent annual report.
Let’s Encrypt is a project of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to protecting Internet users by lowering monetary, technological, and informational barriers to a more secure and privacy-respecting Internet. For more, visit abetterinternet.org. Press inquiries can be sent to press@abetterinternet.org