A lot about our team can be learned through our history. We started as a small group of software engineers with a passion for open source. Our first steps were supported by Red Hat, Inc. However our goal from day zero has been to engage with a community of security auditors and government specialists. At first, we failed, because we focused on rigidly following the SCAP standard. However, we learned from our mistakes, and we started to listen to our users. Our mindset and focus then shifted towards making tools that address real user needs.
The OpenSCAP Base project started in late 2008. Two notable people were involved with the origin of the project. Steve Grubb, then Principal Software Engineer with Red Hat, had been interested in the OVAL language and he saw the SCAP standard emerging. Peter Vrabec, was leading a small team of young engineers in Brno, Czech Republic. The first few years were spent on implementing features of OVAL, XCCDF, CPE and CVE in OpenSCAP Base. During that time about 7 developers played with the project.
After a while, the scap-security-guide project was founded. The government, businesses and users together formed a community and started to collaborate on the next generation of security guidance. There have been a lot of significant contributors, however Shawn Wells has been a great steward of scap-security-guide throughout its history. In September 2013, Ján Lieskovský joined SSG and focused on day to day project maintenance. The scap-security-guide is an important piece of ecosystem, because a scanner without a policy is like beer without alcohol.
Another notable project is scap-workbench, that allows users to customize security policy. The scap-workbench was writen by Martin Preisler, who also contributes to all of the other projects.
In more recent history, we have been integrating OpenSCAP with other open source projects. Šimon Lukašík lead the integration of OpenSCAP to the Spacewalk and Foreman projects. Vratislav Podzimek created oscap-anaconda-addon and Martin Preisler has started OpenSCAP-Daemon which will become our integration point, going forward. Finally, Lenka Horaková has designed the website you are looking at.