OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Geir Magnusson Jr.]

On Jan 17, 2009, at 4:07 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote:

> Hi Geir,
>
> On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 09:53 -0500, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
>> What do you think we've been fighting for at the ASF for the last 8
>> years, and specifically, the last 2 for the JCK?
>
> I appreciate you trying to fight. And trying to change things from
> within the JCP. Which is indeed brave. You share that optimism with
> Dalibor who also always urges to not burn down that which produces bad
> results and be positive that change can happen. I might have become to
> cynical with the results not being free, open and community friendly
> over that many years, that I focus my efforts there where I can  
> actually
> produce free code in the open. You risk legitimating an institution
> which doesn't guarantee software freedom without achieving any of your
> goals. And alienating the community that you say you are fighting for
> because you hide any talks and results behind the shadowy-cabal that  
> you
> have become part of.

Who are the committers - who should be the decision makers in the  
OPenJDK community?

How many don't work for Sun?  (And of those, how many didn't work for  
sun in the past?)

>
>
>>> If through OpenJDK we can improve the process of producing
>>> specs, the reference implementation and free test suites, then I am
>>> all for it.
>>
>> You might argue that it's better, because you can get the TCK for use
>> in OpenJDK and derivatives
>
> It is better because it is under terms that allow publishing any code
> that is tested and/or passes with it under a free software license  
> that
> guarantees that the source, and not unimportantly, all patent claims
> must be shared under reciprocal terms, without any restrictions on use
> for any purpose by any user.

Have you read it?  There's no "any code".  It allows you to test Sun's  
code.

That said, I'm going to apply for one of those licenses - see if Sun  
will give me one.

And no, it's the GPL v2, which has no clear patent language.

[SNIP]

>
>
>> But it didn't work out, mainly because you never could consider
>> yourself producing software under the AL because of your views  
>> towards
>> "software hoarding"
>
> No, creating an alternative code base incompatible with almost all the
> existing efforts and not considering working together on a shared  
> common
> interface to all the components that 30 existing runtimes, class
> libraries, jits, compilers, etc. already were using and working on
> together was what made the harmony effort fail.

Yes, damn all that small-f freedom.  People wanted to do something  
that was different from what you were doing, and that was bad?

IIRC, the Harmony community quickly passed the Classpath community in  
terms of completeness.

> I might not like
> "software hoarding", and I certainly prefer using copyleft licenses  
> that
> are fairly reciprocal, but being expressly incompatible was what I
> objected to.

That's not what you said then.  You were very clear about not wanting  
to contribute software that could be used by "software hoarders".

> Any license that would be compatible with what the exiting
> communities were using would have been OK. Luckily then the FSF did
> solve a lot of those issue though by finally upgrading the GPL and
> making compatibility an explicit goal. Please do reread "Toward a Free
> Java" http://lwn.net/Articles/184967/ if you don't get what the  
> history
> is here.

Does it bother you that such a happy narrative is in conflict with  
reality?  Have you noticed that your patron chose to use a license  
that still is incompatible (GPLv2) and if the response is that the  
GPLv3 wasn't done at the time, it's done now and despite the fact that  
it has full copyright on the codebase, hasn't relicensed?  Why hasn't  
Sun used the GPL v3?  could it be compatibility with AL and other  
licenses, as well as the explicit patent language? (I actually have no  
idea...  I'm predicting I'm going to hear some vague handwaving about  
linux or something)

>
>
>> And if you're not providing code, you're providing "air-
>> cover" by letting them point to openjdk as a model open free software
>> community.
>
> It is an open free software community, even though some derivatives  
> are
> not fully free software.

LIke IBM's JRE?  you call that "not fully free"???  Or Oracle's in-DB  
implementation?  "not fully free"?  How delightfully Orwellian!

> Something I greatly regret. And you will always
> see me being very critical of that and help out any alternative effort
> to work around that. And that works. There has never been any  
> attempt to
> stifle anybody or any group creating any derivative of the code,  
> whether
> it be IcedTea as shipped most GNU/Linux distros now, nor any of the
> other hybrid implementations
> http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/openjdk-hybrids
>
>> So whatever problems you see has historical actually exists, and is
>> still very real and harmful for another group of people with the same
>> interests and aspirations as you, who managed to actually bring an
>> independent implementation together to the point of being ready for
>> compatibility testing.
>
> Sure, I know. We had this back in 2005 already:
> http://advogato.org/person/robilad/diary/64.html
> And even though Dalibor and Onno pushed for it, we never succeeded  
> back
> then with 1.5. Keeping chasing after these old issues instead of
> focusing on the future seems not very productive though. There are
> indeed still serious issues with non-open specs and anti-social TCK
> usage restrictions for 1.6 (I would say the processes around them are
> not really workable right now). But we do have free implementations  
> now.
>
> Instead, lets work together on fixing these issues going forward for
> 1.7, and make sure that we will not just have free code as reference
> implementation, but also with a fully free community process we all  
> seem
> to want. Either through the JCP if you feel that can still be saved,  
> or
> by going around it if it ends up not being able to produce results  
> that
> are free for all.

No, lets fix our current problems.  Our current problems tell us a lot  
about what is going to happen in the future unless we really fix them.

I realize it's much more convenient to ignore them - you get to stay  
in the clubhouse - but they are *very* serious and along with the  
current state of OpenJDK governance (the topic of this thread), point  
to a rotten foundation upon which all of this is built.

Lets fix the foundation.

geir