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

[Martijn Verburg]

Andrew has put this far better than I ever could have.  We'd also love to
see this discussion.

Slight side tangent - having a more transparent roadmap (as Oracle sees it)
will also help other OpenJDK contributors not unnecessarily duplicate work,
be able to assist on JEPs lead by others and add complimentary features.
The recent collaboration over the GC interface and various implementations
is a great example of how that can work.

Cheers,
Martijn


On Thu, 19 Jul 2018 at 10:13, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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>
> EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671
>