Foundation BAC Distributions election
Jon Ericson
Mon 8 Dec 2025 8:33AM
Public
Seen by 27
The OpenSSL Foundation invites each participating delegate to vote in the selection of the Distributions Representative for the Business Advisory Committee (BAC).
This election is for the 2026 Foundation BAC.
Voting Details:
* Each designated delegate is authorized to cast one vote on behalf of their organization.
* Voting is open until December 21 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 of OpenSSL Project.
Item removed
Foundation BAC Distributions election (updated)
poll by Jon Ericson Closing Sun 21 Dec 2025 8:00AM
Note: this is an updated poll restricted to delegates as explained in the election guide
Choose the candidate you favor.
Results will be shown after voting has closed
3 of 15 votes cast (20% participation)
Jon Ericson · Mon 8 Dec 2025 8:35AM
Nominee: Clemens Lang
Statement
I am nominating myself for the distributions representative of the OpenSSL Foundation Business Advisory Committee.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Crypto Team maintains and contributes to OpenSSL and other crypto libraries in Fedora, CentOS Stream, and RHEL. As the Product Owner for this team, I have a good understanding of cryptography in distributions in general, but also how they use OpenSSL, and what concerns and problems they have with it. I'd like to represent this point of view in the Business Advisory Committee, and push for modernization without leaving users (both in the OSS project and the person sense) behind. If my title makes you think I'm all talk no code, check out my pull requests. If this sounds good to you, I'd appreciate your vote!
So far, Dmitry Belyavski from the RHEL Crypto Team represented distributions on the OpenSSL Foundation BAC, but he is not planning to run again and has asked me to do so instead.
I want to stress that I'm not in this to represent Red Hat's interests only: For example, the Fedora community regularly disagrees with Red Hat's opinions on cryptography, and I also maintain OpenSSL in MacPorts. My employment contract says participation in an open source community project does not constitute a conflict of interest even where I may make a determination that is adverse to Red Hat's interests. I intend to use this privilege where necessary to further the interests of distributions in general.
One particular goal I want to push for is an improvement in contribution experience, because I believe this will be healthy for the project. Some lively discussion has already started, and I have a few more ideas to propose.