Rich Salz

Career

As of July 2014, Rich Salz is a principal engineer at Akamai Technologies.

His previous position was technical lead for the XML appliance products at IBM. He came to IBM when he was Chief Security Officer of DataPower, which was acquired by IBM in 2005.

He has made numerous contributions to recent work on XML and SOAP specifications, particularly involving security.

He was an early contributor to the free software movement. In 1986 he replaced John P. Nelson as editor of the original "moderated" Usenet group for free source code, mod.sources (later renamed to comp.sources.unix). This newsgroup was a primary distribution medium for high quality free software before Internet access became available to the public. He wrote cshar. Salz posted early releases of patch, localtime, perl, cvs, elm, and the first free tar program. He passed the job of editor to Paul Vixie in 1991. He also wrote InterNetNews, "the first available news server" and "the original software that most large news servers used" in Usenet. His select-based I/O architecture in INN has been replicated in high performance HTTP servers. Rich Salz was one of the authors of RFC 4122: A Universally Unique IDentifier (UUID) URN Namespace.

Personal life

For many years, he spelled his name 'Rich $alz' (see Talk:Rich Salz for an explanation).