OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2020/07/28

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 28 July 2020 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. OJN legal footers
  2. Oracle Code One
  3. Project Skara update
  4. Any other business

Three Board members were present: Georges Saab, Andrew Haley, 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. OJN legal footers

Georges began the meeting by declaring it quorate. After noting that this was on the agenda due to Chris' request, the Board decided to defer discussion until he was present.

2. Oracle Code One

Referencing a past public announcement, Georges provided a brief description of the anticipated format of Oracle Code One. Instead of the usual in-person conference, Code One would be a series of virtual days featuring different topics. Java content would be covered by a single day's worth of sessions (7 or 8), with repeat broadcasts in different time zones. The keynote will be presided over by Georges and Mark. Andrew commented that at both the JVM Language Summit (JVMLS) and the OpenJDK Committers' Workshop (OCW) he placed significant value on informal personal interactions. He believed these connections were difficult to reproduce in the necessarily formal video conference. Mark observed that Devoxx Belgium had been cancelled. Nobody relished the thought of a long-haul flight to attend an in-person conference at this time.

4. Any other business

Andrew introduced the topic of bugs which are only viewable by Oracle employees. Georges said that there were occassionally confidential bugs which contained customer or Oracle infrastructure details which could not be made public. Andrew noted that Red Hat experienced similar situations and added that exceptions should be made for security vulnerabilities. He suggested creating a non-confidential version of the bug and using this new bug for OpenJDK purposes such as setting flags and tags. Mark considered this solution saying that the JDK bug system allowed confidential comments, but not confidential descriptions. After discussing various bug-handling scenarios which all started off with confidential bugs, the Board determined that this approach would not be too onerous. Thus, the Board encouraged all OpenJDK Projects to use non-confidential issues for code changes. Comments in commit messages should only link to bugs that everybody can read. Security vulnerabilities would be the only exception.

Mark declared that such a recommendation would need to be on a per Project basis since there was no mechanism to prescribe a general OpenJDK policy. Andrew replied that the JDK Project was his concern. As the JDK Project Lead, Mark committed to drafting a proposal for confidential bug handling and circulating it to the Board.

3. Project Skara update

Circling back to this agenda item, Andrew noted that Chris should be present for this item as well. After a brief discussion, the Board decided to hold a meeting approximately two weeks hence at a time convenient for Chris with the legal footer and Project Skara update agenda items. If possible, Joe Darcy should be invited to speak about Project Skara.

At this point, the Board adjourned.