CFV: New Project: ZGC

[Andrew Haley]

I sympathize with both side of this discussion.

Of course I'd prefer to see all JDK software freed: my response has
always been you say yes, let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred
schools of thought contend.

However, I'm also painfully aware of how it feels to be outside Oracle
working on OpenJDK.  When we started the Shenandoah project at Red
Hat, we had no particular worries about how well it would perform: our
biggest worry was "Will Oracle allow us to contribute this to
OpenJDK?"  In the end we decided that we were going to do it anyway,
and if needs be we'd maintain it outside OpenJDK's core repository,
but it remained a significant worry for a long time, and Shenandoah is
still not in.  You could argue that our fears were misplaced, but they
were real.

This near-duplication of projects doesn't encourage any would-be
contributor to work on OpenJDK.  It makes it hard to build trust.
Somehow we need to turn OpenJDK into a more open-source project, one
that encourages all participants.  (I'm hoping that the change to
time-based releases will help with that, but it's another matter.)

Oracle developers are the gatekeepers for the core projects, and it
sometimes appears that decisions are made as a _fait accompli_ and
merely announced to the OpenJDK project.  Up to now it's been arguable
that it's natural that Oracle should lead all of these projects
because they were the primary authors and provided the bulk of the
engineering effort.  But we've been working on this together for ten
years now, and it is no longer the case that Oracle is the only
organization with the expertise to contribute in a major way.

So yes, let's open ZGC.  But let's also try to work together so that
we can share the heavy lifting and deliver the best GC technology to
the people who really matter, our users.

On 27/10/17 00:23, John Rose wrote:
> Put another way:  Would you really prefer that we keep ZGC
> wraps while we replay the Shenandoah cross-examination, to
> some s
uggested number of months?  Wouldn't it be better to
> get the code bases out there and then figure out what to do
> with them?  Of course it would.


-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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