Snap Format Technical Oversight Board

The snap format is a compressed filesystem with a single metadata file describing the security profile and desired integration of the snap. That format is shared by everyone in the snap community, regardless of their choice of store, authentication systems, licensing or host Linux distribution. In order to reflect the widespread and diverse interests at play, Canonical will cede final decisions and control over the format itself to a Technical Oversight Board that represents a range of communities and companies. The snap format is driven by code landing in the upstream snapcore repositories, subject to public code reviews. The Snap Format Technical Oversight Board is independent, with no single company having a majority say, and it has the ability to prevent any change in the format or standard interfaces which all implementations are expected to support. In this way, we can be confident that different groups implementing the specification will have the ability to influence it as needed. * Matthias Klummp - Appstream * Timothy Redaelli - Arch * Luke Faraone - Debian * Cody Garver- Elementary * Harald Sitter - KDE * Aleix Pol- KDE * Gustavo Niemeyer - Ubuntu * Michael Vogt - Ubuntu * Jean-Baptiste Kempf - VLC * Neal Gompa - Fedora The committers to the snapcore repositories agree that this group supervises the evolution of the format, and that members of the TOB will be able to reject changes by majority vote, even after they have landed in the snapcore repositories, which have not yet been released for stable snaps to consume. While the snap implementation in snapcore is free software and can be forked, our goal is to evolve the format consensually across the communities represented here, as well as any other major free software communities that enable snaps by default. The board can be reached at oversight-board at lists.snapcraft.io for discussions related to their supervisory role. We would like to thank this group for agreeing to serve in this capacity during the founding period of the snap format. Regards, Jamie. -- Ubuntu Core Engineering Manager