Today, Chainguard, which provides secure, production-ready builds of open source software, has introduced a customer-led steering committee for its Chainguard OS and is recruiting members starting now.

Chainguard has launched the Chainguard OS Fully User Directed Committee, or the Chainguard OS FUD Committee, so that Chainguard OS evolves around customer needs rather than focusing on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that’s often associated with purpose-built Linux distros, Dan Lorenc, co-founder and CEO of the company, told The New Stack.

Chainguard OS will be customer-governed and the result will be a more stable, predictable OS.

“We’re asking our customers to trust us, and I think we need to be willing to trust them too as our interests are aligned,” Lorenc said.

Chainguard OS is the base layer of all the software that the company builds and packages. It goes into all Chainguard products.

It also is a secure, customer-centric foundation for the modern software supply chain and has “become one of the most trusted pieces of infrastructure in our customers’ ecosystems, and part of a solution that delivers stability and security at scale,” Lorenc wrote in a blog post.

Moreover, as Chainguard customers depend on Chainguard OS, the company wants to ensure that its users are shaping its future.

“We’re letting our product, our core project, be in the hands of our customers for them to steer it,” Lorenc said.

Tongue-in-cheek

Lorenc acknowledges the tongue-in-cheek nature of the FUD Committee’s name, but it will be a serious effort, he said. Chainguard’s R&D team will work closely with committee members to set standards and continue to deliver “trusted open source across use cases,” Lorenc noted.

The committee will include customer organizations of all sizes, industries, and geographies, with members from both engineering and security teams.

Member responsibilities

Lorenc wrote that key responsibilities for members will include:

• **Technical decision-making: **Influencing the technical direction of Chainguard OS, advising and deciding on key technical paths to maintain flexibility and ecosystem compatibility. For example, this could include deciding whether Chainguard OS should continue to use the upstream APK client rather than forking to add additional functionality.
• Roadmap alignment: Aligning on upcoming features, architecture shifts, and package support.
• Strategic feedback: Providing early input on breaking changes, new security primitives, and distro-level optimizations.
• Ecosystem advocacy: Identifying emerging technologies or language ecosystems that should be prioritized for Chainguard OS support.

Committee structure, size, mission

“We don’t know the exact structure yet, but these things generally run best when they’re relatively small, but not too small — somewhere in the five to seven range of representatives,” Lorenc said in an interview. “It’s going be a lot of work from those people. So, we’re announcing this now for our customers, and we’ll be selecting that first group, and they’ll be in charge of their own decision-making and how they do transitions and stuff like that. The only real rule is you’ve got to be a customer of the project, using it day to day.”

The FUD Committee’s mission is to ensure Chainguard OS remains the world’s most trusted, secure, customer-centric foundation for the modern software supply chain, Lorenc said.

“Committee members will act as the voice of the user to help Chainguard make technical and roadmap decisions based on real-world enterprise requirements and needs,” he wrote.

The FUD Committee will keep users in the loop and make decisions in the open.

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