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.
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