Dear all,
First let me clarify I am writing this e-mail in my capacity as a contractor to Software Heritage and not in any other role.
I am excited to see the Open Regulatory Compliance group progress and would like to contribute from my career experiences of the last 40+ years on behalf of Software Heritage to the work of the Specification Committee. As a contributor in multiple standards contexts as well as a member of several open source projects I believe I bring a unique blend of experiences to this work. This e-mail is thus my self-nomination as a candidate from a Foundation Member to the Specification Committee.
Bio
I'm Simon Phipps and I have worked in the computer industry from graduation in electronic engineering, first as a mainframe technician at Burroughs Machines and then as a workstation expert at Unisys. I moved to IBM UK Labs and worked first in a quality assurance role on networking software and then on CODEC standards for video collaboration, filing IBM patents on several innovations. I then joined the leadership team that established IBM's Java business and worked popularising Java technology and later XML.
I moved to Sun MIcrosystems to continue that work and was soon drawn in to the recently-named open source software. I became leader of Sun's OSPO and in that role helped release most of Sun's software portfolio as open source software. Parenthetically I gave the first outside keynote at EclipseCon and represented Sun at the Open Mobile Alliance.
In 2010 I switched to running my own consulting company serving multiple clients with practical open source guidance, especially project governance. Having started to volunteer at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) while at Sun, I was elected to its board of directors and later became its President. I led its transition to become a stakeholder-based organisation and promoted its evolution into a staff-led entity. Since 2017 I have been leading its engagement with de jure standards and EU technology policy, in a client relationship since I left the board. I represent OSI at ETSI and worked extensively to mediate between the open source community and the European Commission around the CRA. I have also been supporting Software Heritage since its inception and am honoured they have asked me to help here.
Position
As a frequent commentator as the CRA evolved including suggesting this very activity, I am keen to see ORC identify the threads of experience and wisdom from the open source communities that will help guide compliance with the CRA's Software Steward role. I also believe it is important to identify the practices that will help other open source projects to deliver software that entities with CRA compliance roles will find easy to bring into compliance. I believe both of these tasks will need willing collaboration from a wide range of open source projects as well as constructive input from their downstreams. I sincerely hope the European Standards Organisations creating harmonised standards for the CRA will seek to use our work.
Best regards
Simon
