Thanks for the comments! I'll let Mark Reinhold continue to address those about definitional and procedural details, but here are a few notes about others:
On 06/01/11 06:10, Mark Wielaard wrote:
The qanda tries to explain why some of these changes weren't yet made, but some of the explanation was somewhat unclear to me. It says that "this reduces the near term risk carried by the corporations represented on the Governing Board". What are these risks precisely?
I don't think there is an answer to this that doesn't entail non-public business plans (that I don't know) within each of the competing companies. The best we can do is make rules amenable to change if these (and perhaps additional competing companies) re-assess risks.
Isn't there a danger that these companies completely dominate the board otherwise since they already provide the most "resources" and so by definition of meritocracy the most members?
Note that the membership and voting rules are such that almost nothing can happen if more than one non-appointed GB member objects. As others have pointed out, this isn't a full safeguard, but I think it is enough.
I wanted to better explain why the OCA is not balanced, but I can no longer find a copy.
Hmm. Me neither. I've heard that an OCA revision is soon forthcoming, so maybe that's why. To address your later points about it: I don't think there are any plans to remove the non-reciprocity properties of OCA itself; i.e., that by contributing, you do not automatically get the right to distribute non-contributed parts of OpenJDK or builds. Oracle still requires separate negotiation of distribution rights. A lot of things having little to do with OpenJDK per se would need to change for this to happen, so I don't expect any near-term progress on it. Although it would be nice if there were a better explanation of how anyone could go about getting such rights, and nicer still if there were a simple standard way for non-corporate contributors and researchers to get permission to distribute non-branded experimental test releases ant the like.
The community bylaws talk in several places about "the OCA or its equivalent". What makes something an equivalent to the OCA?
I think this is just a safeguard to avoid the kinds of problems encountered when the SCA became the OCA.
Something I missed while reviewing previous drafts is that there doesn't seem to be a definition of contribution and/or how/which code gets integrated into a project. One could assume that the OCA (or its equivalent) defines that. But, even if you accept that as guiding principle, those are for new original works. But OpenJDK often sees contributions of code that are not covered by that definition. Like the periodic import of util-concurrent, the jaxws drops, etc.
I don't see how this is an issue? For example, we let java.util.concurrent settle elsewhere (under different packaging) before integrating, but still contribute it under OCA.
While looking at the trademark license I was surprised to find version 1.1 at http://openjdk.java.net/legal/openjdk-trademark-notice.html
Thanks for the reminder about adding discussions about revisions of this to GB todo list!
Currently there are a couple of proposals for infrastructure changes (bug database, code review framework) that are in danger of being implemented using closed proprietary code. This would effectively make it impossible for contributors to implement effective code changes to this infrastructure. The licenses section should explicitly also cover the infrastructure code used and deployed by the project. These are tools developers will have to work with every day, and so they should be free to change, adapt and share their modifications to them with others to make their usage more effective.
I confess that I don't have any good ideas about this, so have stayed out of that discussion, hoping that others do. -Doug
