DaemonCore Academy Is Free. Our Professional Tools Are Not. And We Are Looking for Volunteers.
We want to make something very clear about what we are building at DaemonCore.
DaemonCore Academy is free.
Not partially free.
Not free until you reach the good material.
Not a seven-day trial designed to get your credit card.
We are attempting to give people an entire cybersecurity education without charging them for access to that education.
That means lessons, practical exercises, labs, security concepts, workflows and training material remain available without an educational subscription hanging over the students head.
But DaemonCore is also a business.
We build professional cybersecurity tools, and those products are paid products.
We think that is completely reasonable.
Servers cost money. Development costs money. Code signing costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Support costs money. Continuing to build Academy costs money.
Somebody has to pay for all of this.
We would rather sell useful professional tools to people and organizations that need them than put the classroom behind a paywall.
That is the model.
Education funds nobody. Professional tooling funds education.
If you are learning cybersecurity, use Academy.
Keep your money.
Learn.
Practice.
Break things in the environments designed to be broken.
Get better.
If you eventually reach the point where you need the professional tools DaemonCore builds, those products are there too.
Buying one does more than purchase software. It helps us continue giving the educational side away.
We do not think building a free Academy means DaemonCore should be embarrassed to sell software.
Quite the opposite.
The commercial products are what make the free mission sustainable.
And as Academy continues growing, we want more knowledgeable people involved.
We are looking for volunteer Academy contributors.
We are interested in people experienced with cybersecurity, penetration testing, ethical hacking, Linux, networking, Active Directory, Microsoft Entra and Azure, web application security, cloud security, Wi-Fi, SOC operations, defensive security and adjacent fields.
You do not need twenty certifications hanging on your wall.
You need knowledge worth passing on.
Volunteers might review lessons for technical accuracy, contribute educational material, propose labs, review exercises, write technical articles, improve explanations or help us identify subjects Academy should cover next.
And there is an important boundary here:
We are not asking volunteers to build DaemonCores commercial products for free.
Volunteer contributions are for the free Academy and its educational/community resources.
Our commercial software remains commercial software.
Our free education remains free education.
We believe those two things can coexist.
In fact, we think they have to coexist if we want this project to survive for years instead of becoming another ambitious free project that disappears when the hosting bill arrives.
The mission is pretty simple:
If you want to learn, we want you to be able to learn.
If you need professional tools, we want to build tools worth paying for.
And if you buy those tools, part of what you are supporting is the idea that the next person should not need a credit card just to start learning cybersecurity.
That is the ecosystem we are trying to build.
Free education.
Professional tools.
One supports the other.
And we are just getting started.
I := DAEMONCORE
DaemonCore Academy
Free cybersecurity education.
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