OpenSSL 3.0 will not be released until the fourth quarter of next year at the earliest. That is a delay of half a year. The first beta of the code should be delivered in the summer of next year.
OpenSSL developer Matt Caswell describes the delay in a progress blog. It states that the developers will not save the proposed deadline and that the software should not be released until around October next year. Initially, OpenSSL 3.0 should have been completed by the end of 2019, but that deadline was moved to ‘mid-2020’. It now turns out that that was too ambitious. OpenSSL 3.0 is expected to be in beta by the end of the second quarter. The final release will follow ‘at the beginning of the fourth quarter’.
The most important change of OpenSSL 3.0 is the addition of so-called ‘providers’. There are different providers for different types of encryption algorithms. The default provider implements the most commonly used algorithms, but there will also be a Legacy Provider for legacy algorithms and a provider for algorithms validated with FIPS.