OpenJDK governing board, constitution

Mark Wielaard mark at klomp.org
Fri Jan 16 00:11:53 UTC 2009


Hi Neal,

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:58 -0800, Neal Gafter wrote:
> 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.

That is a very good point. Thanks for bringing that up. Currently we act
as if the JCP has some kind of status that restricts certain kinds of
modifications to public APIs. But this has been kind of a problem since
access to JSRs and JCKs is not guaranteed to be free of restrictions
that are incompatible with our way of working in a public and open free
software project. (See the multiple months long [still unresolved!]
thread on pkg-distro-dev about the inability to use a lot of official
JSR documents for work on OpenJDK.)

If we can get a smoother way of working on standards through OpenJDK
that would indeed be very welcome. But does indeed need to come with
some kind of guide lines of how we would like to handle such
responsibilities.

Cheers,

Mark




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