OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Simon Phipps]

On Jan 16, 2009, at 19:51, Andy Tripp wrote:

> Simon Phipps wrote:
>> On Jan 16, 2009, at 19:09, Andy Tripp wrote:
>>> What has changed so that a constitution is no longer needed?
>> Who said it wasn't needed?
>
> I'm deducing that you believe that a constitution is not needed,  
> because
> the GB is the one who was supposed to create it, it hasn't, and that  
> seems to be OK
> with you. Do you think it's needed or not?

Yes, I think a document on procedures will be needed at some stage. We  
already have an interim statement that seems OK with the people who  
have commented and seems to be causing no problems, so pragmatically  
there doesn't seem to be a gap at present. By the way, I am not  
setting the agenda for the OGB, I'm a participant like all the others.

>> It's just that the only dispute that has arisen so far appears to  
>> be this one,
>
> Naturally, no issues are going to "arise" if there's nowhere for  
> them to go.

The OGB exists and has a mailing list, hence this discussion.

> Closures are a good example. As you know, there are several  
> proposals and
> at least one implementation out there. At this point, it looks like  
> Neal
> could probably get BGGA closures into openjdk just by committing the  
> code. Could that code then flow into the JDK (without a JSR) or not?

I hope that whatever governance the OpenJDK community finally creates,  
it will never give the OGB a role of technical judgement.  I agree  
with Andrew that open source steering bodies are there to establish  
order, not architecture. As David has pointed out, the content of the  
reference implementation is dictated by the spec, not by the work of  
any code contributor of any affiliation.

S.