More Open Source Experts Join CSPRI at George Washington University

FOR IMMEDIATE PRESS RELEASE            		      	CONTACT: Tony Stanco
April 28, 2003   	   			(202) 994-5513; stanco@gwu.edu
					         MEDIA CONTACT: Matt Lindsay
				        (202) 994-1423; mlindsay@gwu.edu 

Open Source Experts Join GW's Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute

Institute a Leader in Policy Issues and Research on Secure Open Source Software

WASHINGTON - The George Washington University is pleased to announce that
Brian Behlendorf, Miguel de Icaza, Hans Reiser, Jay Beale, Jeffery "hemos"
Bates, Russell Coker and Brian May, all world-renowned leaders in the Open
Source movement, have joined its Cyber Security Policy and Research
Institute(CSPRI).  They join Bruce Perens, Rishab Ghosh, Martin Dean,
AdamTuroff, John Viega and Tony Stanco, who are already part of theOpen
Source team at CSPRI.

"I am quite interested in seeing the public sector adopt Open Source
technologies, but even more interested in helping the public sector
understand that it can work with the Open Source community to promote open
standards, open systems and open government," said Brian Behlendorf,
founder of APACHE, a decentralized community of developers working on Open
Source software projects.  "Governments the world over, from China to
Germany to Brazil to Canada, are moving aggressively in this direction. I
am honored to be asked to serve in an advisory role on these issues at
CSPRI."

"I am very excited to become involved with the CSPRI team, as it will help
us promote the use of free software in the government and in the branches
of the government that reach the people," said Miguel de Icaza, founder of
GNOME, a type of Open Source software that provides free and easy-to-use
desktop environment for the user, as well as a powerful application
framework for the software developer.

"I'm interested in pursuing research and support around understanding how
Open Source software is designed and developed, and the social network that
is involved in making some of the best software in the world happen," said
Jeffery "hemos" Bates, founder of Slashdot, a Web site billing itself as
"News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."  "Additionally, I'm also passionate
about adoption and usage of Open Source software in the governmental,
educational and commercial realms, for both technological and social
reasons. CSPRI is working in all these areas and I'm very happy to join
forces with them."

"Open Source brings the greatest potential for operating system security,
by allowing users the utmost flexibility to configure and add security
mechanisms," said Jay Beale, original author of Bastille-Linux, an Open
Source development to "tighten" Unix operating systems.  "The most timely
examples are the Center for Internet Security's security configuration
standards guides and the NSA's extreme security-model for Linux, called
SELinux, which CSPRI is working on."

"We are at a key turning point for the filesystems field. The semantics of
the Unix and Linux filesystems have remained essentially unchanged since
the 1960s," said Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, an Open Source
filesystem.  "Microsoft is focusing its OS development efforts on a
dramatic bid to take the filesystem from the hierarchical semantics of the
60s to the relational semantics of the 70s (SQL).  We will take Linux into
the new millennium by adding support for semi-structured data querying and
modeling. We have started by creating an infrastructure for supporting
military grade security.  We have already rewritten the infrastructure
supporting the old hierarchical semantics so that they can be upgraded
without being discarded.  Now, with the assistance of CSPRI, we will be
able to start working on these exciting new semantics."

Other new members of the CSPRI team are Russell Coker, a Debian developer
doing major work with SELinux, and Brian May, who maintains the
Heimdal/Kerberos package in Debian.

CSPRI, established in 1993 at GW's School of Engineering and Applied
Science (SEAS), is one of the Open Source movement's premier venues for
policy discussions, and research and development.  The institute regularly
brings together representatives from local, national and international
organizations in both the private and public sectors to address the impact
of Open Source on governments around the world by hosting Open Source in
Government conferences.  It is also involved in Open Source government
policy formation, the National Security Agency's Security Enhanced Linux
(SELinux) and the NIAP certification of Linux.

For information about CSPRI, visit www.cpi.seas.gwu.edu.
For more information about SEAS, visit www.seas.gwu.edu. 
For more news about GW, visit the GW News Center at www.gwnewscenter.org.

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