Learning from Let’s Encrypt’s 10 years of success

Foundations have a hit-or-miss success rate in software, generally, and open source, specifically. I’m on the record with 908 words of eyeroll for the Open Enterprise Linux Association and OpenTofu, given the conspicuous absence of cloud vendor support. Yet I’ve also recommended projects like Kubernetes precisely because of their foundation-led community support. Foundations can help foster community but are in themselves no guarantee of success.

This is why Let’s Encrypt and the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) are so fascinating. There is no obvious reason they should’ve succeeded, yet 10 years in, ISRG’s Let’s Encrypt has issued more than one billion certificates to secure more than 360 million websites. It’s also likely that the nonprofit’s Prosimmo, a memory safety project, and Divvi Up, a privacy-preserving metrics system, will follow that pattern, even as many other foundations fail to deliver similar victories (OpenStack, anyone?).

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