OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/1/15 Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com>:
> The reason I ask is that I'm worried that openJDK may turn into the defacto
> mechanism for features getting into the platform.  The JCP used to play that
> role, but there has been little activity in forming a JSR for Java SE 7 in
> the past few years.  I've noticed that openjdk7 is more and more being
> called Java 7, JDK7, etc, even though it doesn't implement a platform
> specification approved by the JCP.  If openjdk is to become the mechanism by
> which features are added to the platform, it would be better for the
> governance model to acknowledge and support that.
>
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 6:15 AM, Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Neal,
>>
>> On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 19:15 -0800, Neal Gafter wrote:
>> > The OpenJDK governing board, having had its life extended by a year,
>> > is now scheduled to dissolve in four months, with two of its non-Sun
>> > positions remaining unfilled.  The last published meeting minutes were
>> > from April 2008, at which it was agreed that the GB would strive for a
>> > draft Constitution by the end of 2008.
>> >
>> > Who are the seven members of the governing board?  Can we please see
>> > the minutes of meetings after April, and get a status report on the
>> > Constitution?
>>
>> Good questions, and I don't know the answers.
>> May I ask a meta-question in return though?
>>
>> What do we really expect from the governance board?
>>
>> While it has been completely missing in action for the last half year, I
>> cannot say I have actually missed it. Things do seem to happen anyway.
>> What kind of issues do we as hackers really have that could be solved by
>> having an active governance board and a "constitution"?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>

If that turns out to be true, such a process might actually be even
more closed than the current JCP process. Although using a Free
codebase with the intention of community participation seems the
intention, and would actually make things better, so far the reality
seems to be that what ends up in OpenJDK7 is decided behind closed
doors at Sun.
-- 
Andrew :-)

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