OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 28 April 2011 10:56, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:17 AM, Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp.org> wrote:
>> So, how do you propose this so called "governing board" goes about
>> convincing people like Andrew to not throw up their hands in disgust at
>> ignoring the people doing actual community work and trying very hard not
>> to just have to give up on OpenJDK and fork away? This board is largely
>> made up of people which are not even actual OpenJDK hackers.
>
>
> I know very little things, Mark. I just have a few opinions, one of
> them is that the companies that have put more man hours into a project
> (or even, created them!) and pays for most of its developers should
> have a bigger say in the direction a given FOSS project, than a few
> vocal chronic complainers that apparently would only be happy if such
> companies "give up" all control of the project, all in the name of
> "community" of course.
>

We're not saying they shouldn't have a say or even a "bigger say" than
others.  We're
saying that they shouldn't have the only say, which is what this
governing board tries to
establish.

These "few vocal chronic complainers" are the same ones that have actually
made OpenJDK successful by making it available to users.  It is one thing to
drop a bundle of code over the wall.  It's quite another to make a community
project out of it.

> The FSF has repeatedly refused to take down RMS´ anti-java rant "the
> java trap" article even while it has been renedered obsolete years
> ago, the moment Sun Microsystems decided to release Java SE as Free
> Software.
>

Looking at:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

it has been updated to reflect the current situation.  I don't think it should
be removed from the site, in some attempt to pretend the whole thing never
happened.

I'd also hardly call that a rant.  It's a perfectly clear argument, just one you
maybe don't happen to agree with.

> So, "it takes two for tango", and sadly -as a former FSF contributor-,
> I can´t say I know what the FSF´s true intentions are anymore, and
> that rants like Andrew´s which start by attacking the governing board
> contribute very little to a climate of collaboration or moving things
> forward, unless of course the aim is to create the self-fulfilling
> prophecy, that is in this case, a fork.
>

I don't see what the FSF has to do with this.

I'd hardly call my brief comment a rant either, though I admit it was
(deliberately) blunt.
I wasn't attacking the governing board so much as I don't acknowledge
this as being
one or having any right to a say over a project which the majority of
its members don't
contribute to.

Maybe you can explain why it's right that five people, three of whom
have never contributed
to the project, get to dictate, based on a closed discussion, that we
can't have a new code
repository?

> But hey, that´s me and my probably wrong, baseless and biased
> opinions, I´m sure.
>

Not sure whether that's sarcastic or not... it isn't really clear in e-mail.

> FC
>



-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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