February 2026 minutes

Attendees: Dmitry Belyavsky, Barry Fussell, Igor Ustinov, Jon Ericson, Richard Levitte, Matt Caswell, Nicola Tuveri, Tomas Mraz, Dmitry Belyavsky

Old Business

• Discuss the critiques from pyca and HAProxy

New business

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

  • In an ideal world, it would be nice to have the election to be offset by six months. (Matt)

  • There is a risk of election fatigue from almost constant elections. (Nicola)

  • Should we have two separate committees? (Matt)

  • Does it muddy the waters of decision making between the “what” and the “how”? (Nicola)

  • We don’t want to put people off from standing for the committees if it’s seen as too technical. There’s also the problem of too many slots for too few people at the moment. (Matt)

  • We could have multiple slots in the future when the community grows. It would also be helpful to a backup in case someone can’t make it. (Tomas)

  • It helps to have two separate meetings about the “what” and the “how”. (Nicola)

  • Could it be solved by labeling agenda items according to the purpose? Sometimes we need to talk about the same topic for both groups with the potential for a time delay. (Tomas and Matt)

  • Since we don’t, unfortunately, have very active communities, it’s hard to find people for committees. (Igor)

  • Part of the responsibility for being a representative is animating the community so reducing the number of representatives could go against the goal of onboarding people into the community. (Nicola)

  • Even from the start, we should allow two representatives to a combined committee if there are enough people who step up. (Tomas)

  • Maybe time box the two types of agenda items to give them equal importance. (Nicola)

  • No disagreement with merging if there are two slots and clear delineation as Nicola suggests. (Barry)

  • Merging is not a problem since the distinction between Business and Technical isn’t clear. But there still is a concern about getting quorum for the representative elections. (Dmitry)

  • We might remove people from being counted in the quorum if they haven’t been active recently. (Tomas)

  • Since voting for the same items across several communities could also add to the election fatigue. (Nicola)

• Community PR lost in the shuffle (Nicola)

  • The burden of keeping track of PRs falls on the person in the community compared to PRs from internal people which are tracked and brought up in regular standup meetings. Could the same process used for internal contributions be applied to external contributions. (Nicola)

  • There are three engineering teams. There is a plan to reinstitute a bug wrangling process, but it does not currently cover PRs. We have new resources, but they tend to be focused on new initiatives and they don’t yet have committer status. (Tomas)

  • The process is broken so it’s not just a matter of having the resources. We have ~350 PRs and 20 committers so can we make progress on triaging PRs? (Dmitry)

  • From an external perspective, OpenSSL emphasizes the importance of community contributions but when the contributions come they face a wall. (Nicola)

  • Yes, this is a concern, it’s just hard to know how to solve the problems. (Tomas)

  • Two angles: there’s a process issue that we can work on in relation to the bug wrangling process. While we do have resource constraints, we have people in the community who could be part of the solution.  (Matt)

  • This particular PR didn’t stall from too few reviews, but too many. Someone needed to help get it moved along. (Nicola)

  • This might have been an exceptional PR. The process needs to handle this situation as well as the more common situations. (Matt)

  • The release strategy page should have a projected date for the feature freeze. When the feature freeze is discussed internally, it should also be shared externally. (Nicola)

  • We could even have the blog posts pre-written for the next few releases. (Jon)

• We sort of have a distribution vote - what are the next steps? (Dmitry)

  • Serves and input to decisions about what the Foundation should do next. Priorities for 4.1. (Matt)

  • Maybe we need to get input from other communities as well. (Tomas)

  • We did a survey for 3.6 with 

• Foundation annual report webinar: 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 (Dmitry)

• 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