commit 0a8f8efdd15ff512ee6aa41719bdd52573724043
parent 68baf9ebc2b715b094c320a10c61041b3d982886
Author: Martin Schanzenbach <schanzen@gnunet.org>
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2022 18:50:39 +0200
add about
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+# About GNUnet
+
+GNUnet in its current version is the result of almost 20 years of work from many contributors. So far, most contributions were made by volunteers or people paid to do fundamental research. At this stage, GNUnet remains an experimental system where significant parts of the software lack a reasonable degree of professionalism in its implementation. Furthermore, we are aware of a significant number of existing bugs and critical design flaws, as some unfortunate early design decisions remain to be rectified. There are still known open problems; GNUnet remains an active research project.
+
+The project was started in 2001 when some initial ideas for improving Freenet’s file-sharing turned out to be too radical to be easily realized within the scope of the existing Freenet project. We lost our first contributor on 11.9.2001 as the contributor realized that privacy may help terrorists. The rest of the team concluded that it was now even more important to fight for civil liberties. The first release was called "GNet" – already with the name GNUnet in mind, but without the blessing of GNU we did not dare to call it GNUnet immediately. A few months after the first release we contacted the GNU project, happily agreed to their governance model and became an official GNU package.
+
+Within the first year, we created GNU libextractor, a helper library for meta data extraction which has been used by a few other projects as well. 2003 saw the emergence of pluggable transports, the ability for GNUnet to use different mechanisms for communication, starting with TCP, UDP and SMTP (support for the latter was later dropped due to a lack of maintenance). In 2005, the project first started to evolve beyond the original file-sharing application with a first simple P2P chat. In 2007, we created GNU libmicrohttpd to support a pluggable transport based on HTTP. In 2009, the architecture was radically modularized into the multi-process system that exists today. Coincidentally, the first version of the ARM service (ARM: Automatic Restart Manager) was implemented a day before systemd was announced. From 2009 to 2014 work progressed rapidly thanks to a significant research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft. This resulted in particular in the creation of the R5N DHT, CADET, ATS and the GNU Name System. In 2010, GNUnet was selected as the basis for the secushare online social network, resulting in a significant growth of the core team. In 2013, we launched GNU Taler to address the challenge of convenient and privacy-preserving online payments. In 2015, the pretty Easy privacy (pEp) project announced that they will use GNUnet as the technology for their meta-data protection layer, ultimately resulting in GNUnet e.V. entering into a formal long-term collaboration with the pEp Foundation. In 2016, Taler Systems SA, a first startup using GNUnet technology, was founded with support from the community.
+
+GNUnet is not merely a technical project, but also a political mission: like the GNU project as a whole, we are writing software to achieve political goals with a focus on the human right of informational self-determination. Putting users in control of their computing has been the core driver of the GNU project. With GNUnet we are focusing on informational self-determination for collaborative computing and communication over networks.
+
+The Internet is shaped as much by code and protocols as it is by its associated political processes (IETF, ICANN, IEEE, etc.). Similarly its flaws are not limited to the protocol design. Thus, technical excellence by itself will not suffice to create a better network. We also need to build a community that is wise, humble and has a sense of humor to achieve our goal to create a technical foundation for a society we would like to live in.
+
+
+## Project governance
+
+GNUnet, like the GNU project and many other free software projects, follows the governance model of a benevolent dictator. This means that ultimately, the GNU project appoints the GNU maintainer and can overrule decisions made by the GNUnet maintainer. Similarly, the GNUnet maintainer can overrule any decisions made by individual developers. Still, in practice neither has happened in the last 20 years for GNUnet, and we hope to keep it that way.
+
+The current maintainers of GNUnet are:
+
+ * [Christian Grothoff](https://grothoff.org/christian/)
+ * [Martin Schanzenbach](https://schanzen.eu/)
+
+
+The GNUnet project is supported by GNUnet e.V., a German association where any developer can become a member. GNUnet e.V. serves as a legal entity to hold the copyrights to GNUnet. GNUnet e.V. may also choose to pay for project resources, and can collect donations as well as choose to adjust the license of the software (with the constraint that it has to remain free software). In 2018 we switched from GPL3 to AGPL3, in practice these changes do not happen very often.
+
+## Philosophy
+
+The primary goal of the GNUnet project is to provide a reliable, open, non-discriminating and censorship-resistant system for information exchange. We value free speech above state interests and intellectual monopoly. GNUnet’s long-term goal is to serve as a development platform for the next generation of Internet protocols.
+
+Participants are encouraged to contribute at least as much resources (storage, bandwidth) to the network as they consume, so that their participation does not have a negative impact on other users.
+
+### Design Principles
+
+These are the GNUnet design principles, in order of importance:
+
+ * GNUnet must be implemented as Free Software — This means that you have the four essential freedoms: to run the program, to study and change the program in source code form, to redistribute exact copies, and to distribute modified versions. (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
+ * GNUnet must minimize the amount of personally identifiable information exposed.
+ * GNUnet must be fully distributed and resilient to external attacks and rogue participants.
+ * GNUnet must be self-organizing and not depend on administrators or centralized infrastructure.
+ * GNUnet must inform the user which other participants have to be trusted when establishing private communications.
+ * GNUnet must be open and permit new peers to join.
+ * GNUnet must support a diverse range of applications and devices.
+ * GNUnet must use compartmentalization to protect sensitive information.
+ * The GNUnet architecture must be resource efficient.
+ * GNUnet must provide incentives for peers to contribute more resources than they consume.
+
+### Privacy and Anonymity
+
+The GNUnet protocols minimize the leakage of personally identifiable information of participants and do not allow adversaries to control, track, monitor or censor users activities. The GNUnet protocols also make it as hard as possible to disrupt operations by participating in the network with malicious intent.
+
+Analyzing participant’s activities becomes more difficult as the number of peers and applications that generate traffic on the network grows, even if the additional traffic generated is not related to anonymous communication. This is one of the reasons why GNUnet is developed as a peer-to-peer framework where many applications share the lower layers of an increasingly complex protocol stack. The GNUnet architecture encourages many different forms of peer-to-peer applications.
+
+### Practicality
+
+Wherever possible GNUnet allows the peer to adjust its operations and functionalities to specific use cases. A GNUnet peer running on a mobile device with limited battery for example might choose not to relay traffic for other participants.
+
+For certain applications like file-sharing GNUnet allows participants to trade degrees of anonymity in exchange for increased efficiency. However, it is not possible for any user’s efficiency requirements to compromise the anonymity of any other user.
