I'm not concerned about the fact that most OpenJPA committers are IBM employees, but committership *is* de facto closed by the usual Apache meritocracy principles.
If you don't get enough volunteers among Apache members for upgrading OpenJPA to JPA 2.1, you might start thinking about making it easier for people to contribute and/or become Apache members. In the age of DVCS, contributing a feature to an open source project should not be harder than creating an issue, forking a repository, writing some code and submitting a pull request. IMHO, Apache is more of a cathedral than a bazaar - for potential contributors willing to code in their spare time, the entry barrier is too high. Best regards, Harald
