CFV: New OpenJDK Members Group Member: Simon Tooke

[Andrew Hughes]

On 28/05/2020 06:10, David Holmes wrote:
> Vote: Veto
> 
> "An OpenJDK Member is a Contributor who has demonstrated a history of
> significant contributions to the Community as recognized by a vote of
> the existing OpenJDK Members."
> 
> Simon has only a handful of contributions to date.
> 
> David
> 

Hi David,

Thanks for raising this. I don't think it's ever been clearly clarified
what one is meant to achieve to obtain OpenJDK membership.

The wording of 'significant contributions' on [0] is (I believe
intentionally) ambiguous. Commits are also not the best measure of this;
not everyone's contribution to OpenJDK takes the form of regular
commits. There's also the case that authorship is often lost. due to the
real author not having OpenJDK authorship, or backport work being
credited to the original author, not the backporter.

I nominated Simon & Alex because both have been working on OpenJDK for
well over the year mentioned on that same page. In terms of commits, I
believe both have sufficient numbers for committer status (Simon has
this, voting on Alex's is underway).

Is being a committer not enough to be considered a member of the
community? I'm a little concerned that the barrier is being set too high
here and, given the main purpose to being an OpenJDK member is to gain
voting rights, we risk disenfranchising a significant proportion of
those working on OpenJDK. Looking through other recent membership votes,
there are some that seem to have taken place relatively late, unless we
expect all members to have hundreds of changesets.

I could accept the need for a minimum status of reviewer status for
membership, if that was clearly stated and consistently applied. As it
stands, the initial OpenJDK members group was populated not from the
pool of reviewers, but from those with group membership [1]. I remember
this clearly myself, because I recall transitioning to the bylaws with
reviewer status, but not as a member of this group. I instead had to
find someone who was and get them to nominate me, which is perhaps why
it has always seemed a little peculiar to me going forward.

The set of groups seems to have changed little since the early days of
OpenJDK and their main role seems to be sponsoring projects. I see
plenty of people listed who have achieved reviewer status, but have no
group membership. My only group membership was this one until the
creation of the vulnerability group recently.

I seem to remember that the initial groups and their members were based
on the setup inside Sun at the time, so, if that in turn was used to
onboard the initial OpenJDK members, then there will be some who became
OpenJDK members by virtue of being in the right place at the right time,
rather than having to meet the requirements of this voting process.

In short, it would be good to finally get this clarified and agree on
clear criteria for OpenJDK members. I'll be happy to withdraw these
votes at that time, if the criteria agreed upon is not met by Alex & Simon.

Incidentally, the bylaws also still dictate automatic expiration after a
year [2] so, in theory, none of us are OpenJDK members any more and
can't propose anyone to become one... ;)

[0] https://openjdk.java.net/groups/members/
[1] https://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/bylaws/draft-openjdk-bylaws-10#_B
[2] https://openjdk.java.net/bylaws#expiration
-- 
Andrew :)

Senior Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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