OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2020/04/09

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 9 April 2020 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. 2020 Governing Board Election
  2. Any other business

Four Board members were present: Georges Saab, Andrew Haley, Christian Thalinger, 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.

0. Welcome Christian Thalinger

Georges began by welcoming Chris as the newly elected At-Large member of the Governing Board (GB). Georges briefly described the meeting schedule and emphasized that meetings are only held if there are agenda items. The Bylaws require the GB to meet at least once per quarter. The first order of business for all meetings is to determine whether the meeting attendees constitute a quorum. A meeting is quorate if a simple majority of its members are present. There are five members of the GB. Minutes are produced then reviewed and approved by the GB before they are posted publically. Georges stated that the intended function of the GB is to make sure that things are functioning smoothly, not to make technical decisions.

Chris noted that the Bylaws allowed for both public and private meetings and asked whether either of these had occurred. Georges replied that the annual, public FOSDEM panel discussion could be considered a public meeting; however, the GB had never had an Open Meeting inviting all OpenJDK members. When Chris asked why all GB meetings were not public by default, Andrew and Mark both said that doing so would inhibit frank discussion and they expected important topics would be discussed privately, before the meeting. Mark believed that the minutes were a fairly accurate record of meeting discussions.

1. 2020 Governing Board Election

This was the first election to have more nominees than open seats so, per the Bylaws, the election used the Single Transferable Vote (STV) method to select the winners. Mark declared use of the new third party voting system a success. One user who runs with Java Script disabled reported problems voting. If a future election requires SVT, then voters would need to be warned. While not perfect, use of the external interface was expedient compared to creating a new OpenJDK election system.

Echoing statements from the last GB meeting, Georges again thanked Doug Lea for his many years of service.

2. Any other business

OpenJDK Mail Delivery Problems

Georges noted that while there had been no formal GB request, he wanted to discuss reports of missing e-mail from the OpenJDK mailing lists. Andrew added that this was an issue he also wished to bring to the Board's attention. He said that the problem occurred because some company's mail servers only pass messages which have verified checksums. He believed that migration from Mailman 2.x to version 3+ should resolve the issue. The list of affected people included Google, SAP, and Twitter employees and anybody who used gmail as a service. Mark declared that this was a known problem that Oracle's infrastructure team could address. He warned that the upgrade was non-trivial since there were quite a few differences and the transition would need to be sensitive to the preservation of URLs.

Observers

Mark suggested updating the set of GB Observers. He reminded the Board that Observers are past members of the GB who attend meetings to provide their expertise. They ask questions and contribute their wisdom but do not have a vote. The current set of Observers is Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse Foundation) and Steve Wallin (IBM). Mark proposed removing them, explaining that neither had attended a meeting in several years. Mark also nominated Doug Lea as an Observer saying that Doug said he would agree.

Andrew seconded the motion and it was passed unanimously.

AGREED: Doug Lea is appointed as Observer. Mike Milinkovich and Steve Wallin are removed.

Georges planned to contact Mike and Steve. Mark took responsibility for informing Doug.

Quarterly and Annual Reports

Chris asked whether somebody could complain that the OpenJDK Community was not adhering to the Bylaws because quarterly reports were not produced.

The OpenJDK Bylaws specify several different mechanisms which may be used to monitor activity in the OpenJDK Community. Quarterly reports summarizing recent activities required from all Group and Project Leads. A Quarterly Report summarizing the Community's recent activities is also required from the OpenJDK Lead. Finally, the GB also produces an annual report.

Georges believed that the reports were needless bureaucracy on top of a transparent Community and they would not be of use. Only a handful of quarterly reports have ever been produced. Mark reminded the Board that it declined to enforce quarterly reports long ago. Another past meeting suggested removing them if and when the Bylaws were updated.

At this point, the Board adjourned.