2020 Governing Board Election
The OpenJDK Governing Board oversees the structure and operation of the OpenJDK Community. It has two At-Large Members who serve for a term of one calendar year, nominally starting on the first day of April each year.
Nominations for the 2020 term were due by 23:00 UTC on Monday, 16 March 2020.
During this time any OpenJDK Member could nominate an individual who did not currently hold an appointed Governing Board seat to fill one of the At-Large seats. That individual need not already be an OpenJDK Member. An OpenJDK Member could make more than one such nomination.
Results
Voting started on Tuesday, 24 March 2020 12:01am UTC and ran for two weeks, ending Monday, 6 April 2020 11:59am UTC. Secret ballots were used, per the Governing Board's direction.
There were four candidates for two open seats, so per the OpenJDK Bylaws two winners were selected via Single Transferable Vote (STV), specifically the Meek algorithm.
The winners were Andrew Haley and Christian Thalinger.
Details describing how votes were tallied may be found in the election results page.
Candidates
Four individuals were nominated, and each accepted his nomination. The candidates' own statements were as follows:
- Andrew Haley, Red Hat
I'm the only incumbent Governing Board member in this year's election. That makes me the establishment candidate, no matter how surprising that tag might seem to me, so I have to stand on my record.
GB meetings are rarely exciting. Occasionally important decisions are made, but they are mostly uncontroversial. My position as a board member, however, enables me to contribute in another way by reaching out to people behind the scenes.
There have been many such conversations; one I can talk about is the discussion that led to the creation of the OpenJDK Vulnerability Group. When we, the community outside Oracle, started to maintain older OpenJDK releases, I realized we were in danger. Oracle held the list of still-secret vulnerabilities in Java but they had no way to communicate what they knew with us. I asked for privileged early access; they came back with the idea of a Vulnerability Group. After a lot of work, lawyers, contracts, and getting permission from executives, we formed the VG. It has been a great success.
The VG is an example of a classic Free Software win-win: everyone benefits from co-operation. It could not have happened without building up mutual trust and respect over time.
The GB is, in a sense, the court of final appeal if there are any unresolved procedural disputes in the Project, but happily that has never been necessary. We can't know what challenges will arise in the future, but I am certain that co-operation will be the best way to respond to them. That is what I stand for, and with your support it's what I will continue to do.
Addendum: On reviewing this statement, "reaching out to people" sounds rather passive. In fact it's not: it's hard work. Negotiating is one of the most demanding things anyone can do. You have to empathize with the other person to find out what they really want, find common ground where you can, and decide when to compromise. You also have to pick your battles wisely. It's never a good idea to try to force people to cave in because even if you succeed once, there may not be a next time: they'll be gone. It's hugely rewarding because when the Free Software multiplier works, nothing can beat it.
- Christian Thalinger, Twitter
Twitter is heavily invested in the Java Platform because of its usage of Scala. We are even building our own internal JDK which is based on OpenJDK. Twitter has also been a member of the JCP EC for many years. Our team is trying to be an active member of the OpenJDK community but that isn't always as easy as it sounds. Personally I have been a member of the OpenJDK community as long as it exists. As a member of the OpenJDK GB I want to make sure that OpenJDK processes are as easy as possible to encourage other companies and individual contributors to participate. Also, I would like to make the OpenJDK GB more transparent. My feeling is that most people in the community either don't know it exists or don't read the meeting minutes. Maybe there is a better way to communicate with the community.
- Gil Tene, Azul Systems, Inc.
I am running for an elected seat as an At-Large Member of the OpenJDK Governing Board. In that position, I intend to represent and forward the interests of the Java community: of the many developers who contribute to OpenJDK, of the massive base of users who consume OpenJDK distributions, and of the creators of various OpenJDK distributions.
I decided to run for the GB position this year due to some significant shifts that have occurred in the Java ecosystem and in OpenJDK over the last couple of years. Many (most) of these shifts are positive IMO, including the move to a more rapid and predictable release cadence, the increased community contribution to upstream versions, and most importantly, the significant shift towards community-based and community-led maintenance of update releases that are widely used in production.
With these important changes taking hold, our new community-led efforts bear a great responsibility for keeping OpenJDK both stable and vibrant. The Governing Board, through both direct direction and indirect influence, can do much to affect this balance, and I intend to lend my voice to that effort.
As an At Large Member, I will view my role on the OpenJDK Governing Board as being a community representative first and foremost. I have experience in taking that position in both technical and procedural matters, e.g. through my participation on the JCP EC and EGs, my Java Champion activity, my OSS project contributions, and my participation and organizational positions in developer events.
I have been an active open source developer, contributor, and community member since well before the term "Open Source" was coined. Over the years, I have consistently managed to maintain my personal open source activity and balance it with my various jobs, striking a good balance and "wearing the right hat at the right time" as needed.
In my current job as CTO of Azul Systems, I lead the direction of multiple OpenJDK distributions, both free and commercially supported. This makes me keenly aware of the real-world production concerns of both enterprises and a wide array of OSS projects, and informs my actions and positions both at Azul and with regards to OpenJDK projects.
I believe that the OpenJDK GB should strive for and maintain a level playing field, encouraging a plurality of high quality binary distributions that will keep our end users happy and productive. I believe that I have a clear track record towards these goals of working to ensure that credible Java runtimes are available for all, for fairness and contribution, and for healthy collaboration both within OpenJDK and across OpenJDK distributions.
- Volker Simonis, Amazon
I first started working with the early Java pre-releases in 1995 when still at university and got involved in developing Java in 2005 when I was porting JDK 1.4/HotSpot to HPUX/PARISC. I was excited when the OpenJDK Project was announced and instantly signed the Sun Contribution Agreement in 2007. Since than I'm an "OpenJDK activist and HotSpot addict :)" as I'm phrasing it in my Twitter bio. Eventually, I became an OpenJDK Committer (with currently 218 committed changes), Reviewer (with 226 reviews) and a Member of the 'Hotspot', 'Build', 'Porters', 'Vulnerability', and 'OpenJDK Members' Groups.
In 2011 I managed to convince SAP (my employer at that time) to join the OpenJDK Project. Launched in 2013 by SAP and IBM, I had the honor to lead the PowerPC/AIX Port, the first externally contributed OpenJDK port integrated into the OpenJDK mainline, which paved the way for subsequent ports like AArch64 and s390x (also led by me).
During all that time I constantly advocated for more transparency and better infrastructure in the Project. E.g. while doing the PowerPC/AIX Port, we could finally remove a restriction which prevented external Committers from directly pushing reviewed changes to the HotSpot repositories. This was a major annoyance and hurdle for external HotSpot contributors until then. I was also a driving force behind and one of the first beta-testers for the OpenJDK Submit Repo which greatly simplifies multi-platform testing of proposed changes for external contributors.
One of the unfortunate facts about the Java platform is the dichotomy between the OpenJDK Project which develops the Java SE reference implementation and the Java Community Process (JCP) which owns the Java SE specification and Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). Between 2014 and 2019, while I was serving in the JCP Executive Committee and the Java SE 9-13 Expert Groups (JSR 379, JSR 383, JSR 384, JSR 386, and JSR 388), I always argued for a better alignment and cooperation between these two bodies. For me, transferring the TCK to and making it an integral part of the OpenJDK is still a long term goal which is worth while fighting for.
I'm an absolute Open Source enthusiast but I'm not naive. I understand that the wast majority of OpenJDK developers (including me) get paid by companies for doing their work. Also, while the percentage of community contributions is constantly growing from 20% in JDK 11 to 30% in JDK 13 and with all the JDK 6, 7, 8, and 11 Update Projects being run completely by the community meanwhile, Oracle is still by far the biggest contributor to OpenJDK. But all this doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for a better infrastructure (e.g. open, multi-platform & performance testing) and better project management (e.g. collaborative planing) in order to facilitate participation and attract even more contributors. After all, I'm convinced that open source is still the best model for cooperative software development we have today.
I am currently employed by Amazon working full time on Amazon corretto and OpenJDK (you can find a short bio here). I will be extremely excited if you empower me to work on resolving some of the points sketched before and further advance the OpenJDK project in general by voting me into the OpenJDK Governing Board.
Who could vote?
Anyone who was an OpenJDK Member at the start of the voting period:
Peter von der Ahe, Luis Miguel Alventosa, Artem Ananiev, Poonam Bajaj, Martin Balao, Kim Barrett, Alan Bateman, Tim Bell, Deepak Bhole, Josh Bloch, Joel Borggrén-Franck, Dave Bristor, Andrew Brygin, Martin Buchholz, Alex Buckley, Dmitry Cherepanov, Brent Christian, Mandy Chung, Maurizio Cimadamore, Iris Clark, Sean Coffey, John Coomes, Joe Darcy, Daniel D. Daugherty, Laurent Daynes, Jean-Francois Denise, Dave Dice, Jeff Dinkins, Andrew Dinn, Andrei Dmitriev, Martin Doerr, Mike Duigou, Clemens Eisserer, Xue-Lei Andrew Fan, Michael Fang, Doug Felt, Robert Field, Denis Fokin, Daniel Fuchs, Neal Gafter, Severin Gehowolf, Mikael Gerdin, Jonathan Gibbons, Jennifer Godinez, Brian Goetz, Jim Graham, Markus Grönlund, Zhengyu Gu, Andrew Haley, Thomas Hawtin, Chris Hegarty, Erik Helin, David Holmes, Jim Holmlund, Yong Jeffrey Huang, Andrew John Hughes, Tomas Hurka, Magnus Ihse Bursie, Xiomara Jayasena, Shanliang Jiang, Yves Joan, Erik Joelsson, Yuka Kamiya, Stefan Karlsson, David Katleman, Roman Kennke, Peter B. Kessler, Karen Kinnear, Kirill Kirichenko, Vladimir Kozlov, Ioi Lam, Christoph Langer, Staffan Larsen, Jim Laskey, Doug Lea, Per Liden, Goetz Lindenmaier, Sandra Lions-Piron, Steven Loomis, Omair Majid, Sergey Malenkov, Tom Marble, Stuart Marks, Jon Masamitsu, Eric McCorkle, Keith McGuigan, Rob McKenna, Michael McMahon, James Melvin, Alex Menkov, Sean Mullan, Igor Nekrestyanov, Yuri Nesterenko, Jeff Nisewanger, Kelly O'Hair, Masayoshi Okutsu, Bhavesh Patel, Valerie Peng, Anthony Petrov, Coleen Phillimore, Chris Phillips, Chris Plummer, Leonid Popov, Pavel Porvatov, Alexander Potochkin, Jasper Potts, Antonios Printezis, Yumin Qi, Phil Race, Y. Srinivas Ramakrishna, Paul Rank, Chuck Rasbold, Mark Reinhold, Roger Riggs, Tom Rodriguez, Vicente Romero, John R Rose, Bengt Rutisson, Vinnie Ryan, Vita Santrucek, Naoto Sato, Thomas Schatzl, Xueming Shen, Aleksey Shipilev, Volker Simonis, Serguei Spitsyn, Kumar Srinivasan, Andreas Sterbenz, Thomas Stuefe, Athijegannathan Sundararajan, Anton Tarasov, Christian Thalinger, Dalibor Topic, Christian Tornqvist, Mario Torre, Alexey Ushakov, Alexey Utkin, Swamy Venkataramanappa, Igor Veresov, Mikael Vidstedt, Konstantin Voloshin, Kevin Walls, Max Weijun Wang, Roland Westrelin, Bradford Wetmore, Jesper Wilhelmsson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and Peter Zhelezniakov.
