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About the Legion of the Bouncy Castle
History
Welcome to a brief history of the Legion of the Bouncy Castle!
Originally, in the late 1990s, the Legion of the Bouncy Castle was simply a number of individuals united both in their interests of Cryptography and Open Source. The first official release of the Bouncy Castle APIs appeared in May 2000 and was about 27,000 lines long. The project grew steadily with a C# version of the Java APIs being added in 2006. By 2012 with the Java code base well past 300,000 lines and the C# one over 140,000 it started becoming obvious that a bit more organisation was required to maintain both progress and the quality of the APIs.
Part of this lead to a rewrite of some of the Java APIs, and subsequently the C# ones, to deal with some of the decisions that were made earlier which, in hindsight, were not so good. This slowed down the expansion of the code base a bit by capturing important operations used throughout the higher level protocols such as CMS, TSP, CRMF, and PGP into a set of interfaces. Simplifying the code in itself however was clearly not enough and a not-for-profit association was established in order to provide a more grounded approach to the group's efforts and officially registered in October 2013. In November 2013 the association, officially Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc., was granted Charity status by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) on the basis of its work contributing to advancement in education and on the basis that its work was beneficial to the community at large. Further to this the charity was also registered as a fund raiser by Consumer Affairs Victoria allowing it to accept donations to further the charity's work in improving the APIs and their usability by being able to raise funds for certifications such as FIPS.
That, of course, brings us to the present day, and, as you have probably guessed, the story is not over! Stay tuned for more.
Operations
As the Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. (ABN 84 166 338 567) operates as a Registered Charity in the State of Victoria, Australia, we come under both the jurisdiction of the ACNC and the Department of Justice, Victoria, more specifically one of Justice's portfolio groups: Consumer Affairs Victoria.
You can find full details about our activities, including our current financial reports at the ACNC registration details page for Bouncy Castle. Sometimes they revise the website, if the link fails the page is also accessible by going to the ACNC website and searching for "Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc." under the "Find a Charity" tab.
If you have any questions in regards to our operations you are most welcome to contact us at office@bouncycastle.org
Our current privacy statemenstatement and list of cookies in use can be found here.