Dear seL4 Board, You will all have heard the news that CSIRO is disbanding the Trustworthy Systems group. You will recall that we had already indicated that the marriage was in terminal trouble, so the development came as no surprise to me (but the team was shocked). The response from around the world was heart-warming. Beyond what you can see on Twitter and LinkedIn, there were very concrete offers of support, some financial (we’re likely to get new members out of this), some asking “please explain” questions to CSIRO management, and talking to government agencies. One Chinese company offered to take over the whole TS team to work for them (this is obviously *not* what we want). Keeping as much as possible of the team in the seL4 ecosystem is our obvious priority. Funding is key to that, but we’ll also have to take some short-term action to ensure continuing support for seL4. The good news is that most of the remaining TS team at CSIRO have expressed clear preference to remain part of the team (as long as it’s outside CSIRO), but they need to have a perspective. The vultures are circling in the sky. We’ll reach out to members, probably having an extraordinary members meeting, to discuss how everyone can help. We’ll also need to have a Board meeting, within about a week, to discuss strategy, but also to amend the approved budget. Here are some of the other relevant developments: - appointment of June as CEO is moving slower than hoped, due to LF’s responsiveness not being great, but it seems to be happening - similarly, getting an agreement with UNSW approved to subcontract some of our staff is moving slowly - however, the migration of the TS infrastructure out of CSIRO into UNSW is progressing well, and the Foundation setup will piggy-pack on that, so the subcontracting there only becomes urgent once the UNSW setup is in place (few more weeks) - CSIRO has at least agreed to donate all of the test boards and related equipment (of no use to them without TS) to the Foundation, saving us some money - the $30k donation promised by Ghost Locomotion is happening: they requested and accepted an invoice, which may already be paid for all I know - given that we have concrete offers for more memberships (including one Premium) we can afford to spend the money we already have more aggressively. The last point is particularly important in the present situation. You will remember that we approved 20% FTE of a junior engineer as a community support person. I think it is now important to upgrade that to a full-time position. One of the existing CSIRO staff would be suitable and is interested in doing this, but we’ll need to make that offer quickly, as he’s talking to a number of companies. Stay tuned for more info, Gernot