OpenSSL Communities
Mon 28 Apr 2025 11:58AM

馃煩 Large Businesses Election for the OpenSSL Foundation TAC

EC Election Committee Public Seen by 71

The OpenSSL Foundation invites each participating large businesses' official delegate to vote in the selection of the Large Businesses Representative for the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC).

The TAC strengthens our technical governance by ensuring that OpenSSL鈥檚 development priorities and technical directions reflect the needs, insights, and expertise of the broader community, in alignment with the OpenSSL Mission.

Voting Details:

  • Each designated delegate is authorised to cast one vote on behalf of their organisation.

  • Voting is open until May 11 at 12:00 UTC.

  • Delegates may update or change their selection at any point until the voting period closes.

  • The results will be visible after the election is closed.

Your participation is critical in shaping the future technical leadership of OpenSSL Project.

EC

Poll Created Mon 28 Apr 2025 12:00PM

Foundation TAC Large Businesses' Election Closed Sun 11 May 2025 12:00PM

Outcome
by Anton Arapov Sun 11 May 2025 1:39PM

As part of the recent TAC election process, Dmitry was elected by three communities: Committers, Distribution, and Large Businesses. Under the TAC formation rules, a candidate may occupy only one seat.

Dmitry has chosen to occupy the Committers seat on the OpenSSL Foundation TAC.

As a result, the tie in the Large Businesses community has been resolved, and Barry Fussell is now elected as the Large Businesses representative on the TAC.

We encourage community members to engage with Barry in their new role as representative for your community.

The formation of the TAC is an important part of the OpenSSL Project community engagement changes we initiated in early 2024.

Congratulations to Barry!

Results

Results Option % of points Voters
Barry Fussell 50.0% 5 CL JJ SK TC JR
Dmitry Belyavskiy 50.0% 5 MR CB SYC JS GC
None of the above 0% 0  
Undecided 0% 32 FV ID JL DS HK JH KM KS G SL RP JR DZ LJ KD WL CC NR BB DK

10 of 42 people have participated (23%)

EC

Election Committee Mon 28 Apr 2025 12:03PM

Nominee: Dmitry Belyavskiy, Red Hat

Statement

have 20+ years of experience with OpenSSL development, have been a Committer since 2019 and a member of the OpenSSL Technical Committee since 2021. I am an OpenSSL maintainer in RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora Linux distributions. My last major contribution to OpenSSL was the introduction of opaque objects for dealing with non-extractable symmetric keys (EVP_SKEY).

My main interest in OpenSSL development is its pluggability. As much extending the functionality as possible should be doable via the providers mechanism. I also think that we need to provide more handles for extending system-wide and application-wide configuration of OpenSSL as a framework.

I believe that something like maintainer's club should be established. This club could also participate in decisions about feature branches and be involved in the CVE process.

I think that we currently don't have enough people to review the PRs. I think we should add the role of reviewers to the role of committers. I believe that the distribution's representatives and the representatives of major companies having their forks should be granted the status of reviewers.

I think that for better communication with various communities OpenSSL, both Corporation and Foundation, should introduce the practice of Open Hours.

EC

Election Committee Mon 28 Apr 2025 12:04PM

Nominee: Barry Fussell, Cisco

Statement

I've worked with forks of OpenSSL for 14 years. During that time, I've lead Cisco's development of crypto and TLS features as well as FIPS and Common Criteria enhancements. As part of our Common Security Modules Team, we support dozens of Cisco product teams that use our OpenSSL fork. I am a current member of OpenSSL's large corporation community. I've also been heavily involved in the creation of ACVP and AMVP automation working closely with NIST and NCCoE. Using that community development experience and my knowledge base from Cisco, working with a set of very diverse teams, provides an understanding of the technical interests as well as hurdles encountered by a large corporation environment. I believe that will be beneficial to the community and technical advisory team.