OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21

[Martijn Verburg]

Hi Mike/all,

> On 28 April 2011 17:37, Mike Milinkovich <mike.milinkovich at eclipse.org> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> The bottleneck here is Oracle's legal review process. I know that the Oracle
> folks are pushing it through as hard as they can, but it does appear that
> they are vastly under-resourced on the legal side. Everyone working on this
> shares the frustrations expressed on this list about how long it's taking.
> Especially because we think we've actually done some pretty good work on the
> bylaws.

Mike, interesting that you raised the lack of legal resource for
Oracle. Henrik Stahl stated this publicly at a panel we were on
together at the Scandinavian Developer Conference.

"Oracle needs more lawyers!"

This of course got a round of laughter, but speaking to Henrik
afterwards, it became apparent that it's a very real problem, and
there is a backlog of work from several technologies and projects
inherited from Sun that the legal teams are still working through.

Speaking as a JUG who wants to get more involved in the OpenJDK, we
feel that a lack of clarity is a factor in preventing more of our
members from getting involved - and we want to see that change. On the
other hand, wearing the hat of developers who have been subject to
traditional corporate development practices, we can understand the
realities of needing to put such changes through legal.

We very much hope that Oracle's public statements about wanting to
unify behind a small number of licenses mean that these kind of
procedural legal roadblocks, once cleared, will not recur - and we
would greatly welcome a statement on behalf of the governing board /
Oracle to this effect.

We note Oracle's preference for communicating only when strategies
have been fully agreed, costed and roadmapped. However, we also note
that this is not, in general, how free and open source software
communities tend to communicate.

We're another party who are really impatient to see the new form of
the proposals from the governing board. However, let's bear in mind
those differences in communication style and not waste energy or start
assuming bad faith based on a document that basically no-one outside
the governing board has seen yet.

Thanks,
Martijn Verburg (& Ben Evans) - London Java Community