On the role of the SCA

[Andrew Haley]

Taking this off the governing board thread:

On 28/04/11 11:30, Mark Wielaard wrote:

> - Get rid of the SCA. Commit to using the GPL for everything.
>   People should be able to be members of the community without
>   having to assign all their rights on non-reciprocal terms to
>   Oracle.

Personally, I think this would be a disaster for free Java.  Oracle
would continue their proprietary projects, making improvements to the
JDK, but would have to firewall contributions from the wider community
to make sure that they didn't get in to the proprietary JDK tree.  So,
the OpenJDK and JDK trees would have to be isolated from each other.
Any contributions from the community that were needed in the
proprietary tree would have to be rewritten.  The end result would
surely be that OpenJDK would be orphaned, and would wither without
Oracle's contributions.  It might make free software developers feel
better, but it would push users back to using proprietary Java.

Andrew.