OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Geir Magnusson Jr.]

On Jan 15, 2009, at 7:11 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote:

> 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.

Yes, the JCP has *exactly* that status - public APIs must comply with  
the Java SE specification as produced by the expert group, or else the  
software is not Java (or, in deference to Sun's ownership of the Java  
trademark, "Java compatible").  I think this reliable consistency is  
one of the great things about Java The Ecosystem (as well as Java the  
Platform).

The downside is that the spec lead has tremendous control over a given  
technology, and right now, Sun's business issues are getting in the  
way of progress for the Java platform, and it's hurting the rest of  
us.  Self-interest is an an entirely rational thing to do for a  
publicly-traded company, but given the damage it's causing the rest of  
us, it shows in very stark light the distance we still have to go  
before this is an open and safe ecosystem in which to work.


> 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.

It turns out that's the least of your problems.  As you know, the ASF  
is engaged in what is now a multi-year battle to get the Java SE 5 TCK  
under terms compatible with being able to distribute the resulting  
tested binary under an open source license.

On the surface, this may appear to be tangential to the problem of  
OpenJDK governance, but all of it is related.

Java will never really be free until we get past all of this.  Please  
inform RMS.

geir