2021 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 2021 term were due by 23:00 UTC on Monday, 15 March 2021.
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 Wednesday, 17 March 2021 12:01am UTC and ran for two weeks, ending Tuesday, 30 March 2021 11:59pm 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 are as follows:
- Andrew Haley, Red Hat
I've been a member of the OpenJDK Governing Board for a long time.
My goal in the OpenJDK project, not just the Governing Board, is to facilitate the work of every contributor. That means making sure that the necessary facilities are provided, and the organizational and social structures work well. Inevitably contributors' goals are not always aligned, so part of that role involves working with people who disagree to find a compromise that everyone can live with. This can take time and a considerable amount of diplomacy, it's not always glamorous or exciting, but I'm convinced that it's the only way to make a community work. This is especially true in the case of a community like OpenJDK, where business competitors and individual contributors work together for a common cause.
There are still some pain points, and an obvious weakness of my position as an incumbent is that I still haven't got them all fixed. Some of these things, such as the way that projects make their technical decisions, are in theory outside the remit of the Governing Board. However, it's still possible for the Board to apply pressure, and we should continue to do so. Onboarding is a perennial problem that has no single cause and is hard to fix. Project Skara has significantly improved things, and we have had a considerable number of new contributors, but there's still a lot to do. We need to find new and better ways to encourage more contributors, but we must do so without breaking this enormously valuable piece of software.
OpenJDK is not a zero-sum game where there are only winners and losers. When we get it right, as we fairly often do, everyone wins.
A few years ago I said:
My goals remain what they have always been: for OpenJDK to be a truly open free software project, to remove barriers caused by process and administrative overheads, and for everyone, especially newcomers, to be able easily to contribute in a friendly and supportive atmosphere.
I still can't think of a better way to put it.
- Christian Thalinger
Last year was my first year serving on the OpenJDK Governing Board and it was an honor to represent the community and to some degree my employer Twitter as well. This year I am running as an independent since I'm currently not working for a company. That makes me the only one running for this position who will represent 100% the community and its interests.
I have been a member of the OpenJDK community as long as it exists and so I think I know what it needs.
Before I joined the board I wanted OpenJDK GB meetings to be more transparent but I quickly realized that these meetings are not as exciting as you might think and the published meeting minutes accurately and entirely describe what is being discussed. For most people these meetings would not be of any interest and so I will, if I'm voted in again, be the representative for you, 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 due to some shifts that occurred in the Java ecosystem and in OpenJDK over the past 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 community-led efforts bear a great responsibility for keeping OpenJDK both stable and vibrant. The Governing Board, through both direct 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 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 of working to ensure that credible Java runtimes are available for all, for fairness and contribution, and for active collaboration both within OpenJDK and across OpenJDK distributions.
- Volker Simonis, Amazon
I started working with 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 then I'm an "OpenJDK activist and HotSpot addict :)" as I'm phrasing it in my Twitter bio. Eventually, I became an OpenJDK Committer (with 224 commits), Reviewer (with 240 reviews) and Member of the 'Hotspot', 'Build', 'Porters', 'Vulnerability' and 'OpenJDK Members' Groups.
In 2011 I managed to convince SAP 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). I worked on the commercially licensed SAP JVM, initiated the SapMachine project and since 2019 I'm working as a Principle Engineer on Amazon Corretto.
I've always advocated for more transparency and better infrastructure. 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 simplified multi-platform testing of proposed changes for external contributors before the transition to GitHub.
If elected into the Governing Board, I'd first like to make the work of the GB itself more transparent. It is unfortunate that the 2021 nomination phase started without any published minutes from the last period. I think that on-boarding new contributors (e.g. getting Author status or Group membership) could be speed up and streamlined and the JEP process could be made more accessible and transparent for external contributors. Finally, as a member of the Vulnerability Group I'm convinced that its effectiveness could be improved by a better infrastructure and I'd like to address this in the GB.
I will be happy if you empower me to work on some of the points sketched above by voting me into the OpenJDK Governing Board. I promise to hear your voices and give my best to further advance the OpenJDK project.
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, Matthias Baesken, Poonam Bajaj, Martin Balao, Kim Barrett, Alan Bateman, Tim Bell, Deepak Bhole, Josh Bloch, Julia Boes, Joel Borggrén-Franck, Dave Bristor, Andrew Brygin, Martin Buchholz, Alex Buckley, Sergey Bylokhov, Dmitry Cherepanov, Brent Christian, Mandy Chung, Maurizio Cimadamore, Iris Clark, Sean Coffey, John Coomes, John Cuthbertson, 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, Ajit Ghaisas, 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, Stefan Johansson, 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, Jamil Nimeh, Jeff Nisewanger, Kelly O'Hair, Masayoshi Okutsu, Erik Österlund, 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, Ambarish Rapte, Chuck Rasbold, Richard Reingruber, Mark Reinhold, Roger Riggs, Tom Rodriguez, Vicente Romero, John R Rose, Kevin Rushforth, Bengt Rutisson, Vinnie Ryan, Prasanta Sadhukhan, Paul Sandoz, Vita Santrucek, Naoto Sato, Anthony Scarpino, Thomas Schatzl, Lutz Schmidt, 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, Jayathirth D V, Swamy Venkataramanappa, Igor Veresov, Mikael Vidstedt, Konstantin Voloshin, Kevin Walls, Max Weijun Wang, Roland Westrelin, Bradford Wetmore, Jesper Wilhelmsson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and Peter Zhelezniakov.
