OpenJDK governing board, constitution

[Andrew Haley]

Mark Wielaard wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 19:15 -0800, Neal Gafter wrote:
>> The OpenJDK governing board, having had its life extended by a year,
>> is now scheduled to dissolve in four months, with two of its non-Sun
>> positions remaining unfilled.  The last published meeting minutes were
>> from April 2008, at which it was agreed that the GB would strive for a
>> draft Constitution by the end of 2008.
>>
>> Who are the seven members of the governing board?  Can we please see
>> the minutes of meetings after April, and get a status report on the
>> Constitution?
> 
> Good questions, and I don't know the answers.
> May I ask a meta-question in return though?
> 
> What do we really expect from the governance board?
> 
> While it has been completely missing in action for the last half year, I
> cannot say I have actually missed it. Things do seem to happen anyway.
> What kind of issues do we as hackers really have that could be solved by
> having an active governance board and a "constitution"?

gcc itself is a model.  The steering committee only gets involved in
political matters and appoints maintainers.  The maintainers control
all the aspects of gcc itself, including features and releases.  In
theory the steering committee could resolve deadlocks between
maintainers, but that has AFAIAA never happened.  Most gcc maintainers
don't ever have to deal with the steering committee.  The steering
committee makes sure that policies to do with freedom and licensing
are followed.  It negotiates with the FSF when problems involving
free sofwtare policy arise.

So, the less the steering committee does, the better.  An active OpenJDK
governance board and a "constitution", it hopefully would not have affected
our work at all.  Their job is to keep out of the way of the people
doing real work.  They've been doing this quite well.

Andrew.