RE: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
Il giorno lun, 09/05/2011 alle 09.53 -0400, Mike Milinkovich ha scritto: Mark, I believe that we have now reached the point in this conversation where we respectfully agree to disagree. Best regards, This is, of course, very legitimate and respected. But I hope you will at least listen to our complains, because they are honestly meant for the best. Oracle has a precedent in this, and things didn't go very well for Oracle, we are trying to avoid to find ourselves in the same situation. Mario -- pgp key: http://subkeys.pgp.net/ PGP Key ID: 80F240CF Fingerprint: BA39 9666 94EC 8B73 27FA FC7C 4086 63E3 80F2 40CF IcedRobot: www.icedrobot.org Proud GNU Classpath developer: http://www.classpath.org/ Read About us at: http://planet.classpath.org OpenJDK: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/caciocavallo/ Please, support open standards: http://endsoftpatents.org/
RE: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
Hi Mike, To further set (perhaps lower would be more accurate) expectations on this front, it is my understanding that any revisions to the OCA will happen _after_ the revised Bylaws come out. That is surprising. The Bylaws are based on the OCA, they use it to define OpenJDK contributors and members. They define the inbound licensing terms for the project as a whole. Since those are pretty essential definitions in the bylaws it would make sense to me to deal with them together at the same time. Sun, and now Oracle, have business motivations and existing contractual obligations that will always require them to aggregate clear title to the intellectual property in OpenJDK. So anyone harbouring hopes that this would change needs to come to terms with this reality. The problem is not (business) motivations and obligations themselves. All contributors have them. And obviously those are different for all of them. There is nobody in the community who is helped by unclear titles to any of the intellectual property (I assume you mean specifically copyrights, distribution terms, patents and trademarks) we all work on based on OpenJDK. To be honest, your response is somewhat offensive. How would you feel if some appointed, non-contributor, to the Eclipse board would state that anybody harboring hopes that there can be a honest discussion on participation agreements, contributor terms, inbound/outbound licensing, right grants among members that are different from all rights of all members will get assigned to one specific commercial company for unstated business motivations, should get to terms with reality? I think this is a good example of why the current so called governance board has a bad makeup. It governs based on the motivations of a very select group of contributors. Some of which don't even contribute themselves. Others are not even bound to the inbound/outbound license agreements all other project members uses. These people might be very good at defending the motivations and contractual obligations their companies have. But there is a very big chance that they completely miss the motivations and pain of other members. As you can expect of the GNU Classpath maintainer, I am actually pretty happy about the current legal setup where everybody gets the code under the GPL plus Classpath exception, just like with GNU Classpath. This makes sure that all contributors, and all end users, get a clear and reciprocal license to all copyrights and patents on the code, which provides them all the necessary freedoms to use, share, study and modify the software any way they like. I think we cannot thank Sun, now Oracle enough for that. But it concerns me that this is not something guaranteed for the project as a whole in either the participation agreement (OCA) nor these new proposed bylaws. Not only the uncertainty about the outbound licensing is an issue that I think undermines the community aspects of the project. The current inbound licensing (only allowed by assigning all rights unconditionally to Oracle, without reciprocity) is already currently harming the project. Some of the following issues are not directly the result of the current legal setup of the participant agreement and board, but they hurt so much more because of the unfairness of the current project setup. And because IMHO neither the OCA, nor these proposed Bylaws protect the motivations of anybody but Oracle (and their proprietary licensees). The project could have had a full deployment implementation, applet viewer, webstarts, etc. integrated to finish the last few non-free JDK requirements. These now live in a separate project (icedtea-web) only because the OCA doesn't allow inbound code unless all the rights are assigned unconditionally to Oracle (not possible in this case, even if the authors wanted, because it is based on some existing free software projects). The same was true for earlier efforts of the IcedTea team, which were just rewritten by Sun employees because the other efforts were based on existing free software. The project could have actual free (binary) releases/daily builds, since thanks to IcedTea we have autobuilders and testers. But when the results were offered to be hosted on dl.openjdk.java.net they were rejected because of more legal issues. Worse, the only releases OpenJDK makes (like the developer previews) are completely unnecessarily under proprietary terms which don't even allow contributors to the OpenJDK code to inspect them, nor do they allow users to even report issues to the OpenJDK project [*]. There is now support/ports for embedded and alternative architectures like arm, powerpc, etc. through the contributed zero and shark code. But you still need to use the IcedTea code base, because the in-tree OpenJDK versions keep breaking because contributions are only run through some proprietary testsuite that don't test the alternative testsuites. IcedTea does provide at least some autobuilders for
Re: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
On 8 May 2011 21:35, Mark Wielaard m...@klomp.org wrote: Hi Mike, To further set (perhaps lower would be more accurate) expectations on this front, it is my understanding that any revisions to the OCA will happen _after_ the revised Bylaws come out. That is surprising. The Bylaws are based on the OCA, they use it to define OpenJDK contributors and members. They define the inbound licensing terms for the project as a whole. Since those are pretty essential definitions in the bylaws it would make sense to me to deal with them together at the same time. Sun, and now Oracle, have business motivations and existing contractual obligations that will always require them to aggregate clear title to the intellectual property in OpenJDK. So anyone harbouring hopes that this would change needs to come to terms with this reality. The problem is not (business) motivations and obligations themselves. All contributors have them. And obviously those are different for all of them. There is nobody in the community who is helped by unclear titles to any of the intellectual property (I assume you mean specifically copyrights, distribution terms, patents and trademarks) we all work on based on OpenJDK. To be honest, your response is somewhat offensive. How would you feel if some appointed, non-contributor, to the Eclipse board would state that anybody harboring hopes that there can be a honest discussion on participation agreements, contributor terms, inbound/outbound licensing, right grants among members that are different from all rights of all members will get assigned to one specific commercial company for unstated business motivations, should get to terms with reality? I think this is a good example of why the current so called governance board has a bad makeup. It governs based on the motivations of a very select group of contributors. Some of which don't even contribute themselves. Others are not even bound to the inbound/outbound license agreements all other project members uses. These people might be very good at defending the motivations and contractual obligations their companies have. But there is a very big chance that they completely miss the motivations and pain of other members. As you can expect of the GNU Classpath maintainer, I am actually pretty happy about the current legal setup where everybody gets the code under the GPL plus Classpath exception, just like with GNU Classpath. This makes sure that all contributors, and all end users, get a clear and reciprocal license to all copyrights and patents on the code, which provides them all the necessary freedoms to use, share, study and modify the software any way they like. I think we cannot thank Sun, now Oracle enough for that. But it concerns me that this is not something guaranteed for the project as a whole in either the participation agreement (OCA) nor these new proposed bylaws. Not only the uncertainty about the outbound licensing is an issue that I think undermines the community aspects of the project. The current inbound licensing (only allowed by assigning all rights unconditionally to Oracle, without reciprocity) is already currently harming the project. Some of the following issues are not directly the result of the current legal setup of the participant agreement and board, but they hurt so much more because of the unfairness of the current project setup. And because IMHO neither the OCA, nor these proposed Bylaws protect the motivations of anybody but Oracle (and their proprietary licensees). The project could have had a full deployment implementation, applet viewer, webstarts, etc. integrated to finish the last few non-free JDK requirements. These now live in a separate project (icedtea-web) only because the OCA doesn't allow inbound code unless all the rights are assigned unconditionally to Oracle (not possible in this case, even if the authors wanted, because it is based on some existing free software projects). The same was true for earlier efforts of the IcedTea team, which were just rewritten by Sun employees because the other efforts were based on existing free software. The project could have actual free (binary) releases/daily builds, since thanks to IcedTea we have autobuilders and testers. But when the results were offered to be hosted on dl.openjdk.java.net they were rejected because of more legal issues. Worse, the only releases OpenJDK makes (like the developer previews) are completely unnecessarily under proprietary terms which don't even allow contributors to the OpenJDK code to inspect them, nor do they allow users to even report issues to the OpenJDK project [*]. There is now support/ports for embedded and alternative architectures like arm, powerpc, etc. through the contributed zero and shark code. But you still need to use the IcedTea code base, because the in-tree OpenJDK versions keep breaking because contributions are only run
Re: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
[Leaving the discuss list CC intact for this post.] On 05/06/11 02:39, neugens.limasoftw...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps not surprisingly. That may be the whole point of the self appointed board. The current self-appointed board it trying the best it can to complete the work of the now-defunct initial self-appointed board (which left only the current interim rules and conventions). Part of this best-effort is trying to expedite adoption of bylaws and revised contributor agreements, as well as encouraging creation of per-project process documents, infrastructure improvements and so on. It is inevitable that all of these will cause a few minor transient snags. But also inevitable that they will result in a better OpenJDK. It's much easier if contributions are selected by some upper level manager rather than via a meritocratic, community based and open approach. My belief is that Oracle did not want to delay jdk8 project creation, so please don't blame them. However, other GB members argued that it is against the medium/long term interest of OpenJDK to proceed using interim rules, given that any delays are expected to be transient. As the meeting minutes show, we arrived at a consensus compromise that limits delay to the main bottleneck (legal review). If transient turns out to be more than a matter of, say, a month, then it can only be because there are some deeper problems. If that is the case, the decision will surely be revisited in light of those deeper problems. -Doug
Re: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
On 27 April 2011 21:45, mark.reinh...@oracle.com wrote: Attached please find the minutes of Governing Board's meeting on 2011/4/21. They're also available on the web: http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/minutes/2011-04-21 Respectfully submitted, - Mark So in short, this unelected self-imposed board has already started to interfere with OpenJDK by preventing work on OpenJDK 8 from happening in the open and being subject to public review. That stinks. -- Andrew :-) Free Java Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com) Support Free Java! Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath http://openjdk.java.net PGP Key: F5862A37 (https://keys.indymedia.org/) Fingerprint = EA30 D855 D50F 90CD F54D 0698 0713 C3ED F586 2A37
Re: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
On 28 April 2011 11:05, Henri Gomez henri.go...@gmail.com wrote: Concretely what could be done to make OpenJDK more community/open aware ? Well, as a start, this governance board could stop interfering and just allow people to get on with writing good code. The previous interim board was great in that it didn't interfere, but was there, should any issues arise that needed its attention. -- Andrew :-)
Re: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
On 28/04/11 11:15, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote: On 28 April 2011 10:56, Fernando Cassia fcas...@gmail.com wrote: So, it takes two for tango, and sadly -as a former FSF contributor-, I can´t say I know what the FSF´s true intentions are anymore, and that rants like Andrew´s which start by attacking the governing board contribute very little to a climate of collaboration or moving things forward, unless of course the aim is to create the self-fulfilling prophecy, that is in this case, a fork. I don't see what the FSF has to do with this. I think Fernando is confused by your email address. Andrew.
Re: OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21
2011/4/28 4:19 -0700, si...@webmink.com: On 28 Apr 2011, at 11:13, Doug Lea wrote: (This was the first meeting for which we have recorded minutes, because we decided to operate meetings as if the Draft 8 Bylaws were in effect.) So have the community concerns and suggestions that have already been offered been considered in detail, or should be repeat them when Draft 8 appears? They've been considered in detail, and a response to each has been formulated. As Doug said, these responses are unfortunately held up at the moment awaiting review from Oracle's legal department. ... We (instigated by me) decided that we can't keep producing documents and making follow-on decisions until at least the bylaws draft is cleared for final community review and ratification. I don't know of a better plan. Sounds reasonable. Is the process for community ratification decided yet? I didn't see that in the minutes either. No, that's not yet decided. We should have a proposal for that soon. - Mark
