OpenJDK Community Bylaws: Second Public Draft

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2011/5/20 12:09 -0700, neugens.limasoftware at gmail.com:
> About the membership, it's not really clear what a simple patch is.

>From the Q&A, item 13 [1]:

  A small or simple contribution is one that has very little intellectual
  content of its own.  It might fix a typographical or grammatical error
  in a comment, rearrange a code loop for better performance, or report a
  failure in existing code but not provide a solution.  There is,
  unfortunately, no universal numerical measure of "small" or "simple" in
  this context.

Does that help?

> Also, I didn't notice that Group membership expires after one year!

Actually that's only true of OpenJDK Members, not all Group Members.

>                                                                     The
> document doesn't specify who to ask for renewal.

There will be a well-defined mechanism for that, but since it could
change over time it's not specified in detail in the Bylaws.

>                                                  It says original groups
> will be created from the old one, but it doesn't say what the old ones
> are,

>From Appendix B [2]:

  The OpenJDK Community has, since its inception in 2006, been operating
  under a set of informal guidelines for Groups and Projects. The
  following changes will be implemented when these Bylaws take effect:

    - The initial set of Groups will be the current set of Groups, with
      their existing Group Members.

  ...

>      it also put a pressure to release quarterly reports, which may make
> sense for some groups. It doesn't say what happens when group fail to
> provide quarterly updates.

That's implicitly left up to the Governing Board to decide, on a
case-by-case basis.  I expect the repeated failure of a Group to publish
quarterly reports will be interpreted by the Board as a sign that the
Group is a candidate for dissolution.

> For the rest, I don't see much difference than the old draft, honestly,
> the same issues with the GB elections still remain.

Understood.

- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/bylaws/qanda.html#q13
[2] http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/bylaws/draft-openjdk-bylaws-09#_B