I know why EFF/Mozilla does it (charity), Akamai do it ($$$ for them), Cisco might also profit from it somehow (e.g. upgraded enterprise appliances to support HTTPS on the proxy), but Facebook? I don't get Facebook's play here.
They aren't totally evil. They want to use their power for good once in a while.
It's not "philanthropic purpose" it's an investment vehicle that can be used to do virtually everyone, without scrutiny.
So the motivation is pretty straightforward: they spend what to them is a small amount of cash in order to get a little goodwill and maybe some positive press. (Which are the usual reasons corporations sponsor not-for-profit projects anyway.) Everybody wins.
Also even just the goodwill of employees of their own employees (who want their company to support this or various open source projects etc.) makes donation make sense for many companies.
Before the skeptical comments rush in
Take, for example, the changes that have happened at Microsoft since Ballmer's departure. I have a hard time imagining the branching GitHub's Atom to make an open source "light IDE", deprecating IE, and Google's using TypeScript for Angular2 happening while Ballmer's faction was in power. Microsoft has the same name, but it's acting like a very different beast.
I'm not sure how one could observe these factions cut across institutions, but I'd be interested if anyone has any suggested readings.
Thinking beware with gifts ...
// edit: there we go, just posted: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta.html
Corporate sponsorship looks to be somewhere around $2m/year.
Is the money needed for scaling? Hiring engineers? Broadening product line?
- Development of the official client[1] and boulder[2], the CA server software behind Let's Encrypt. Both are relatively big projects with lots of things to add/improve on.
- Hosting CA servers in two separate data centers. HSMs for key storage are usually rather expensive as well. CRLs and OCSP are quite bandwidth-intensive[3], that's probably where Akamai's sponsorship comes in. Ops teams have to be available 24/7 in case of outages.
- I'd guess the auditing costs are quite substantial as well. I'm not sure what's necessary to get added to the various root programs out there (Microsoft, Mozilla etc.), but I doubt it's free (unless that's part of some sponsorship).
(I'm not affiliated with Let's Encrypt, just my perspective)
[1]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt [2]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder [3]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed/
It cost them more than that to make the decision and the press release.
Besides internal order, I imagine there's additional concerns and contractual obligations that relate to a public company's stakeholders, e.g. the shareholders who invest with a guarantee that a company has consistent policies in place to manage its spending, whether operational or charitable.
For those unaware, internet.org does not support TLS/HTTPS for most connections. It is probably the single largest attempt in history to remove secure access from a population, just in the name of advertising instead of national security.
Source, please?
EDIT: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/internetorg-not-neutra...
EDIT2: this is from May. I wonder if anything has changed since.