Five years have passed since we started to work at the project. OpenCA has been constantly growing and the number and quality of active installations are, today, too many to be mentioned here. We have to state, for clarity, that the project is still evolving and because of this we can only imagine what the future of the project will be. Today the project counts a quite high number of developers, mainly from universities, and contributing users.
adherence to the IETF standards - at every step we tried to stick to the RFCs covering the matter from the very beginning. Indeed the project basic structure is derived from one IETF specification.
feedback from users - the project have grown integrating help and keeping in mind objections by users and developers.
openness - we tried to keep our sources as readable as possible thus allowing almost everyone to contribute with code or comments.
interoperability - this is a consequence of being adherent to the standard but not only. Whenever possible we tried to support the majority of the systems today available. For example we introduced the usage of Java applets to support Microsoft Internet Explorer and we develop support for SCEP.
usage of simple programming language (whenever possible) - this follows from the consideration that security is not obscurity and we needed to be as readable as possible. Then we choose for PERL which guaranteed for portability and simplicity.
Thus most of the project's objectives have been either achieved and yet are still to be achieved. This could be quite a cryptic sentence but it is not. The project has achieved its goals because it helped in searching for solutions about certification problems and issues. For example OpenCA has made possible for some municipalities to deploy services to its citizens and other organizations to develop applications for their customers, we solved many practical problems together with users and developers and we helped in making this technology available for almost everyone. We also contributed to the discussion on the pkix working group about some specific issues like certificates' suspension. Still the project has not yet achieved its goals because much work is needed for this technology to be widely deployed and accepted by users. Many standards and protocols are engineered every day and thus the project still needs active development to be kept up-to-dated.