Discussion proposal: Who the heck is in charge, anyway?

[Andrew Haley]

This topic is related to some of the things others have been saying,
but is broader.

Despite being on on the OpenJDK Governing Board and the Java SE expert
group, it's still not clear to me who is guiding the development of
the Java platform.  Some of the possible candidates are:

The JCP executive
The OpenJDK Java SE project lead
The JCP Java SE expert group
A few influential and knowledgeable individuals
JCP: Various JSR contributors
OpenJDK: Various JEP contributors
Closed discussion groups within Oracle and elsewhere
All of the voters on mail.openjdk.java.net

The JCP Java SE expert group doesn't really have the ability to guide
anything because all it can do is reject proposals, and by then it is
much too late: everything has already been integrated, and to reject
anything would cause huge disruption.  JEPs have a fairly low barrier
to creation, and although there is a higher bar for targeting, it's
not clear to me that there is an overall design for the API: changes
are adopted piecemeal as they arrive.

In a sense this is the free software way: the people who do the work
get to decide what work gets done.  Historically, this has seemed to
work a lot better than one might reasonably expect, because by and
large people want to co-operate, so they do.

However, there is a considerable risk to OpenJDK contributors.  It's
quite possible that a JEP might be accepted, a substantial amount of
work done, and then the work blocked at the targeting stage, with a
contributor left in limbo.

So, I'd like to discuss the decision-making structure we have,
hopefully find out a bit more about how it's supposed to work, and
think about whether it's the structure we need to go forward.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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