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I'd like to know how Mark Shuttleworth got the cert for Thawte included in Netscape (The company he later sold to Verisign for $575 Million).

I think Verisign was willing to pay so much because his certs were already grandfathered into the browsers, and it was too hard to just pay the browser companies directly.

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i thought he (or someone in his company?) was one of the original people on the mailing list that helped develop how certificates should work in browsers. just was a matter of right place right time.

AFAIK it was him - having developed the first non-US 128 bit crypto capable SSL web server called Sioux (basically, Apache + SSLeay) he was on all the same mailing lists as the Netscape crypto guys.

He then realised that the certs were more interesting than the web servers, and sold off Sioux to Stronghold so he could position Thawte as a CA instead of a software vendor.

Then with the browser war on the go, MSIE3.0 copied Netscape Navigator, right down to the list of CAs included...

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