Meeting Minutes: Board and BAC Monthly (2025-11-24)

Below are the minutes from the recent BAC and Board of Directors meeting. Everyone is encouraged to review the minutes and actively participate in the discussion. This is one of the opportunities to engage directly with BAC members by replying in the thread below. Your input helps ensure the OpenSSL community remains transparent, collaborative, and responsive to your needs.

Attendees

@Anton Arapov, @Billy Brumley, @James Bourne, @Jaroslav Reznik, @Jeff Johnson, @Lenka Luklová, @Paul Dale, @Randall Becker, @Tim Hudson

Agenda

• FOSDEM / Brussels - Distributions community meetup planning

• Events, outreach, marketing support, and swag coordination

• Conference content planning for next year

• Removal of  ENGINE API

• Roadmap and feature-prioritization process

• PQC interoperability

• General updates and coordination

Key Points

• FOSDEM Meetup: Jaroslav proposed hosting a Distributions community meeting in Brussels around FOSDEM, ideally on Friday afternoon before the main event. Venue research, cost estimates, and booking options will be shared soon.

• Events and Outreach: It was agreed that support for local events, meetups, and coordinated messaging should be increased. James will focus on preparing materials for the Japan event planned for January, along with a simple process for announcing and documenting community participation.

• Conference Planning: Feedback from the recent conference noted that provocative and engaging talks were well received. BAC members are encouraged to propose strong, creative, and high-impact presentation ideas early. The Corporation’s marketing team can help turn slogans or concepts into materials.

• ENGINE API Removal: A feature branch is ready, with an opt-in switch planned for limited backward behavior. Supporting documentation explaining the removal and the migration path will be produced.

• Roadmap Input: BAC members expressed a need for clarity on the roadmap. The need for proactive input from the BAC: covering feature priorities, use-case justification, and concrete customer impact was emphasized. A poll or voting mechanism may be used to collect this input in a structured way.

• PQC interoperability: Recurring interoperability issues were highlighted, particularly cases where vendors advertise PQC support but produce incompatible outputs. It will be useful to gather examples across the community and publish guidance, common pitfalls, and known compatibility notes.
  PKCS/CMS-related RFCs (RFCs 9881 / 9882) were discussed, and a question was raised about whether the OpenSSL library supports these new formats. It was noted that these standards are new, and some are unlikely to be directly supported yet.

• Face-to-Face Planning (Q1/Q2): Potential target events for physical meetups and co-located community activities were discussed.

• Scheduling Next Meeting: The group agreed to move the next monthly meeting to January.

Future Meetings and Events

• February 2026: Potential FOSDEM/Brussels Distributions community meetup (final date to be confirmed).

• Early 2026: BAC Face-to-Face meeting.

• January 5, 2026 (UTC): Next BAC monthly meeting.

Action Items

• Jaroslav → Identify venue options, logistics, and cost estimates for the Distributions community meetup at FOSDEM/Brussels, share with BAC and community.

• James → Prepare materials and a brief guide for promoting and documenting event participation.

• Anton → Update the next meeting booking to January.

• OpenSSL Engineering → Produce collateral describing ENGINE API removal and any opt-in functionality.