OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2016/5/5

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 5 May 2016 at 16:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. Vulnerability Group (NDA/License)
  2. Infrastructure Update: JPRT and CCC
  3. Hooks for non-OpenJDK code
  4. Any other business

Five Board members were present: Georges Saab, Andrew Haley, Doug Lea, John Duimovich (about 5 minutes late), and Mark Reinhold.

The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the Board's discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested only in the latter then search for the word "AGREED" throughout the text.

1. Vulnerability Group (NDA/License)

Georges summarized the current state saying that he and Oracle Legal had gone through all of the feedback (primarily from Red Hat) and had made updates. It was decided that the best way to move forward was to request feedback from Red Hat. After that, the updated NDA/License would be distributed to IBM and others for another round of feedback.

2. Infrastructure Update: JPRT and CCC

Georges described JPRT, CCC, and Crucible as topics that people are passionate about and are being worked on quietly. Some of this work would result in proposals in the not too distant future. He hoped for testable solutions by the end of the summer. Continuing, Georges said there was some amount of parallelism in the projects but that the priority was Crucible (for code reviews), the replacement CCC in JBS (aka "CSR"), and a JPRT solution (for non-Oracle developers to test their changes).

Doug expressed his concern about the relationship between the Vulnerability Group (VG) and these infrastructure improvements. Assuming that the VG was still the highest priority, he wanted to know if delays with the VG would prevent work on infrastructure. Georges agreed with the priority and assured Doug that he was trying to make sure that things were not serialized. He explained that the VG agreements were through Legal. He hoped that the infrastructure improvements would not require additional approval scrutiny. Georges noted that large companies have policies which caution against non-employees running large amounts of code on their servers. He was trying to figure out how to achieve infrastructure goals without raising red flags. Doug suggested putting the JPRT servers in neutral territory. Georges indicated that that direction may not be straightforward.

3. Hooks for non-OpenJDK code

Andrew provided background for this item by describing a recent conversation about an entry point for non-OpenJDK code to support ahead-of-time compilation. Somebody commented that only Oracle could get away with adding those hooks. Andrew was generally open to accessing things outside of OpenJDK with the expectation that the Project Lead would suggest an alternative if the proposed code was too intrusive or badly designed. Andrew thought that if Oracle could add hooks, then anybody else could.

Mark responded that when Oracle added hooks, they were designed to be plausibly useful to others. He suggested that a policy statement might be helpful but wondered whether this topic was too technical for the Governing Board (GB). Andrew believed that the basic principle was not too technical. John and Doug both did not see problems adding a hook if it was good for one project or individual and harmless for others. Mark wanted to rely on the Project Lead's judgement. Andrew stated the need to require the Project Lead to provide helpful suggestions instead of simply saying "no". Doug suggested that the cost/benefit discussion be conducted in a public forum.

The discussion concluded with Andrew saying that he might write and circulate a policy statement for further GB discussion.

4. Any other business

Andrew reported the astonishing coincidence of two new OpenJDK ports announced on the same day on the OpenJDK Porters Group mailing list: IBM z/Architecture (s390x) and MIPS (Little Endian). The GB welcomed the new ports and congratulated the porters for their work.

At this point, the Board adjourned.