The Qubes OS project was founded by Joanna Rutkowska in 2009. I joined the project in its early days, before Qubes 1.0, and have been part of the team under Joanna’s leadership since then. Over the past nine years, the system architecture has been enhanced multiple times, including major changes like HVM with stubdomain support, the Hypervisor Abstraction Layer (HAL), and finally, in Qubes 4.0, the Admin API and switch to PVH as the main VM type. The project has also matured a lot. We started as a set of a few manually built packages installed on top of Fedora 12. Now, we have a build infrastructure, documented versioning scheme and release schedules, coding guidelines, and automated tests. The core part of Qubes has also been rewritten a few times since its original release. The project’s success can be measured by its growing community, including deployments like SecureDrop and Let’s Encrypt.

Today Joanna announced that she is stepping down from the project’s leadership role and nominating me as her successor. I have been the project’s lead engineer for a few years now, and I’m honored to officially lead the project as a whole. I plan to continue the direction in which Qubes OS has been going, providing defenses well ahead of new attacks.

On behalf of the whole Qubes team, I’d like to thank Joanna for all of her years of work on the project. Under her leadership, Qubes OS has accomplished a lot, with only some of its many successes mentioned above. We look forward to continuing to benefit from her expertise as an advisor. At the same time, we wish her all the best in her new role on the Golem Project!