OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Jason,

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 09:36 -0400, Jason Gartner wrote:
> Open behavior should be awarded and closed behavior should be exposed.
> Without a set of bylaws, acting upon these simple rules is very difficult.
> I agree it may seem counter-intuitive, but at the moment, we discussed it
> and felt that getting a set of bylaws approved is a priority to begin
> changing this inherent culture within that will take much more time than
> simply opening a project.  Open development, as you noted yourself, is much
> more than hacking code.  Bugs, testcases, build, infrastructure, etc are
> all necessary items needed for open development and something that the
> board is committed to providing.  We need to start somewhere and want
> OpenJDK8 to start under the appropriate governance.

Thanks for that explanation. That does sound logical. And I am happy you
are also considering what it takes to have a truly open community
project beside "code dumps". These are all important things to make sure
we all agree on. Especially with regards to specifications and full
documentation for all code.

But I do get the feeling you are "punishing" the wrong people, and you
might have a much bigger problem than just selecting some common sense
development rules if you don't believe they will be followed unless
"legally enforced".

By having an unelected board veto more open development you are keeping
the engineers inside and outside Oracle that do want to work out in the
open from sharing the little that they can.

And surely if you come up with good working rules they will/must be
adopted for all projects under the OpenJDK umbrella as soon as possible
after we all agree on them. What exactly are you afraid of will not be
followed unless you halt development now? It doesn't make sense to me,
unless there are some specifics in these unpublished governance "rules"
that you are afraid Oracle will sneak out of unless "stopped" right now.
So what exactly are you afraid of will happen in that case?

To be blunt. Looking from the outside it certainly feels like this GB is
being setup to be the scapegoat for stopping open development.

Cheers,

Mark