Rich Salz is currently the technical lead for the XML appliance products at IBM.[1] 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.
For many years, he spelled his name 'Rich $alz' and 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[2] (later renamed to comp.sources.unix[3]). This newsgroup was a primary distribution medium for high quality free software before Internet access became available to the public. 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 free software, including porting AberMUD to UNIX in 1989 and the original release of the well-respected and still-used INN, which became the de-facto software for running Usenet news servers, for a few years.