OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Andy Tripp]

Simon Phipps wrote:
> 
> On Jan 8, 2009, at 16:47, Andrew Haley wrote:
> 
>> So, the less the steering committee does, the better.  An active OpenJDK
>> governance board and a "constitution", it hopefully would not have 
>> affected
>> our work at all.  Their job is to keep out of the way of the people
>> doing real work.  They've been doing this quite well.
> 
> I agree. I'm not 100% happy that there have been no meetings, but I do 
> feel that the overall goal we agreed - to make sure that any kind of 
> committee would stay out of the way of the actual work, and that we'd 
> wait until it was clear what the need was until acting - still seems the 
> right one and seems to have been achieved by default. 

I thought the overall goal of the GB was to create a constitution, not
"stay out of the way of actual work". In fact, looking again at the OpenJDK
charter, it's quite clear that that's the purpose of the GB. You say
"we agreed" above, and assuming the "we" is the GB, I don't see any
big discussion in the meeting minutes about "staying out of the way".

The meeting minutes seem to indicate serious dedication to creating a
constitution. There's no indication there that having no further meetings
and making no progress on a constitution might be a reasonable outcome.

Is there any documentation that the GB ever really agreed that
"we'd wait until it was clear what the need was"? Documented or not,
I'm having a lot of trouble believing that the GB really agreed on this.

> It may well be 
> smart to keep going like this rather than create some document for the 
> sake of having it.

So you create a GB who's main purposes are to create a constitution and
resolve disputes, and now apparently the thinking is that there's no need for
a constitution, so it's OK that the GB never produced anything? What has changed
so that a constitution is no longer needed? Who exactly is the "we"
that doesn't think a constitution is needed and that no GB meetings are needed?

And most importantly, doesn't it seem like there's now an issue that requires
the GB and/or a constitution...namely, the issue of who decides what goes
into "the platform" - openJDK or the JCP? Is the JCP dead, and Neal should
just just try to get closures into the openJDK code? Or is the JCP alive,
and will ensure that openJDK code won't leak into JDK without a JSR?

I think it's time the GB either do what it's supposed to do, or officially
disband and let Java drift where it may. It's just silly to have a group
that does nothing and considers that OK because "we" agreed that it should
"stay out of the way".

Andy