OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Simon Phipps]

On Jan 8, 2009, at 16:47, Andrew Haley wrote:

> So, the less the steering committee does, the better.  An active  
> OpenJDK
> governance board and a "constitution", it hopefully would not have  
> affected
> our work at all.  Their job is to keep out of the way of the people
> doing real work.  They've been doing this quite well.

I agree. I'm not 100% happy that there have been no meetings, but I do  
feel that the overall goal we agreed - to make sure that any kind of  
committee would stay out of the way of the actual work, and that we'd  
wait until it was clear what the need was until acting - still seems  
the right one and seems to have been achieved by default. It may well  
be smart to keep going like this rather than create some document for  
the sake of having it.


On Jan 15, 2009, at 19:58, 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.

There's already code in the wider OpenJDK community that's  
experimental or pragmatic and the world hasn't ended (in fact the Java  
platform is now freely available on Linux) so I'm not sure I  
understand why this is relevant to an open source community. I'm not  
aware (correct me if I'm wrong) that Mozilla has governance statements  
about adherence to W3C process, for example.

S.