| Re: [open-regulatory-compliance] Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group Election Notice - Nominations Dirk-Willem van Gulik |
STATEMENT: I, Dirk-Willem van Gulik, hereby nominate myself for both the Steering and Specification Committees. As one of the founders of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), I have witnessed firsthand the evolution of open source communities over the past three decades. I’ve seen how these communities have, rightly, grown to become the backbone of the modern internet, driving innovation in security and software engineering. Or in other words, I believe that the open source model is fundamental to how we, as a society, innovate, renew, and keep critical systems running smoothly on a global scale—while ensuring fairness in the face of commercial competition. I am deeply committed to advancing and protecting this model. For me it is essential that much needed software regulation, such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), supports, rather than hinders, these open source, interoperability and the innovation it brings. Additionally, I bring with me the experience and lessons learned from the ASF. Open source, and the ASF in particular, has played a pioneering role in addressing, 24x7, challenges such as large-scale supply chain vulnerabilities, responsible disclosure processes, and release engineering in a multi-vendor world. We have, in many ways, written the book on how to handle these complex issues at scale - with fixes measured in days rather than months or quarters. And how to codify these best practices into the `apache way'. While I’ve expressed concerns about the way software regulation, including the CRA, is sometimes imposed, or `dumped', on the industry by policymakers, I want to stress that I very much welcome the introduction of much-needed software regulation. As software is now as critical to society as steel and medicine, we, as an industry, must (be forced to) step up to ensure its reliability and safety. My goal is to take many of the best practices from open source—though often under-documented and based on informal rough consensus—and help formalise, align, and promote them as a reasonable foundation for producing software that is fit for purpose. BIO: Dirk-Willem van Gulik is one of the internet engineers behind the world wide web and one of the founding fathers of the apache web server. He was the President of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) during its first 10 years (and currently still is on the central security team). He has worked for the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the United Nations, telecommunications firms, satellite & space agencies and founded several startups. He participated in different international standards bodies, such as the IETF and W3C on metadata, GIS, PKI, Security, Architecture and Internet standard since the early days. He build the initial engineering team at the very first ‘webserver’ startup: Covalent, helped make big-data and the semantic web reality at Asemantics and created the first first instant play P2P viewer at joost.com. He was the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC where he shaped the audience facing development-delivery platform Forge in the time for the 2020 Olympics and where he made information security and compliance a core enabler for business processes. He provides technical due diligence to investors and assists companies with their technology; taking an (interim) CTO role where needed. He currently works on several medical and privacy intensive security projects with a heavy emphasis on Architecture and Governance. During the Corona crisis he assisted the Ministry of Health of the Netherlands, the EU and the UN with the `CoronaMelder'; where opensource, cryptography and security-by-design helped build trust. And, in his (volunteer) role as Vice President of Public Affairs of the ASF, he more recently has spend waay to much time in Brussels on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Product Liability Directive (PLD) as Europe brings in significant regulation of IT and Open Source. When not at work, he loves to sail or hang out with the lovely people at his local https://makerspaceLeiden.nl. #include <mugshot.jpg> (under separate cover as not to waste bits)
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