February 2026 agenda

I should add:

• We're planning on delaying the election for the Foundation TAC to avoid confusion with the Corporation elections.

https://openssl-communities.org/d/dpuCvbRz/post-quantum-cryptography-pqc-group-recommendations-for-tls-1-3/19

This is an unfortunate outcome when it comes to community contributions.

We have discussed the matter in previous meetings, and Open Hours are one of the mitigating processes in the plans.

But maybe as F-TAC we also need to recommend that the Engineering Management of OpenSSL Foundation puts into place something more effective and that puts less burden on the external contributors.
Right now it is evident that the processes into place easily allow community contributions to fall into oblivion in case some of the engineers/reviewers effectively puts it on hold, but then does not engage further.

I have the impression this is not a problem for contributions that end up tracked in the `openssl/project` repository.
What is the path for for community contributions to consistently get there so that they are handled across springs or accounted for in the backlog metrics, in the same manner that internal/sponsored contributions are?

This is compounded by the still short notice before feature freezes.

We just got a post on Wednesday about the feature freezes for 4.0 which will happen this weekend.

Yes we do have a timeline at https://openssl-library.org/roadmap/index.html but how are external contributors supposed to know they had to expect a feature freezes this week from that? We discussed this before but little has changed.

Why is it relevant for this discussion? We have a track record of somehow losing sight of PRs from our community members. If we inform them on Wednesday of the feature freezes, what kind of options are we giving them to nudge OpenSSL committers to have a look at them so they could still be considered before the feature freezes? We should issue those announcements to our communities about 2 weeks ahead of the feature freezes.

The internal contributors have known and have been repeatedly reminded about the upcoming feature freeze before and during the current spring. We should commit to give external contributors the same chances.

https://openssl-communities.org/d/IHAL1tRm/list-of-priorities-for-distributions
We sort of have a distribution vote - what are the next steps?

Foundation annual report webinar: https://openssl.foundation/news/announcing-our-2025-annual-report

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/30000

I can raise this issue in the Committers community but it seems to make sense anyway

In the last meeting we discussed the proposal to keep OpenSSL support only for Windows starting with Windows 10, i.e. to drop support for Windows XP and Windows 7. I asked the Individuals community for their opinion on which Windows versions should be supported. Despite the corresponding PR has been closed, I'd like to inform you about the results:
starting Windows 10 - 22 votes
starting Windows 7 - 6 votes
starting Windows XP - 6 votes