Hi,

OP-TEE has been running successfully as an open source project since 2014 and can be considered a mature project. It is widely used in various applications and devices, used by both small and large companies and it has an active community.

Although ownership transferred from Linaro to TrustedFirmware a couple of years ago, the core activities around OP-TEE has been mainly been done by Linaro employees and assignees (engineers from other companies working with Linaro). However, with time things change. The core maintainers [1] have moved on to other companies and we're now in a situation that none of the core maintainers are working for Linaro anymore. Although we as core maintainers have expressed willingness to continue contributing to the project, OP-TEE is no longer the only project we are working on and therefore we cannot commit as much time to the project as we used to.

With that there are some open questions like, who is ultimately responsible for the project, who administers mailing lists, merge patches, responds to security incident reports, run monthly meetings an who is the one making releases?

Since this touches legal aspects and plain permissions, we will work with Linaro to try to find a solution to this situation, but this also means that we're looking for new/additional maintainers to help with the project. Maintainers that can commit time to the project and help with the day-to-day activities.

A direct consequence of this situation is that we will not be able to make the release meant to be released July 17th 2026 [2]. That release has been dropped and we instead aim to make the next release in October 2026.

If you are interested in helping out with the project, please reach out to us on the mailing list or directly to any of the core maintainers. We are happy to discuss what it means to be a maintainer and what kind of help we are looking for.

[1] https://github.com/OP-TEE/optee_os/blob/7c38cc358e36a8b74a3fefedb0c5c7f78be0... [2] https://optee.readthedocs.io/en/latest/general/releases.html

// Regards, Joakim, Jens, Jerome and Etienne.