Recently I had the opportunity to be interviewed as a member of the OpenSSF governing board. In fact, I’m not sure I mentioned this here before… I’ve been an observer on the board for all of 2022 and at the beginning of 2023 I joined the governing board as a member to represent Red Hat and bring my own extensive experience in open source software, and security, to the table. The interview “Spotlight on OpenSSF Board Member: Vincent Danen, Vice President of Product Security, Red Hat” was a lot of fun to do and hopefully interesting to people!
At the end of the day, you can’t do this kind of work without tying it to something that you value. For me that’s people. Sure, the model of open source is interesting and awesome, the software produced is amazing, but I think where a lot of folks suffer from short-sightedness is the focus on the software itself, not what you can actually do with it and the impact it has on society. How we have leapt forward so quickly with technology is parallels how society has evolved from a humanitarian perspective (and I’d really like to separate that from a philosophical or idealogical perspective because I’m not convinced we’ve progressed in those areas, to be honest… but that’s a topic for another day!).
Anyways, hope you find the interview interesting. Would be keen to get some thoughts on it — do you feel the same? Different? Sadly no comments on the new blog, but you can always reply on Twitter.