2022 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 2022 term were due by 23:00 UTC on Monday, 14 March 2022.
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, 16 March 2022 12:01am UTC and ran for two weeks, ending Tuesday, 29 March 2022 11:59pm UTC. Secret ballots were used, per the Governing Board's direction.
There were three candidates for two open seats, so per the OpenJDK Bylaws two winners were selected via Single Transferable Vote (STV), specifically the Scottish algorithm.
The winners were Andrew Haley and Volker Simonis.
Details describing how votes were tallied may be found in the election results page.
Candidates
Three individuals were nominated, and each accepted his nomination. The candidate's own statements is as follows:
- Andrew Haley, Red Hat
I've been a member of the OpenJDK Governing Board for some time. In writing this statement, I had the opportunity to look back at previous Governing Board elections and see what the issues were then. My immediate reaction was "Wow! Haven't we come a long way?"
Of course there are always more things to do. There will always be the potential for conflict between people pushing for new features and the crucial need to maintain a stable code base.
We're making progress in many areas. I've been delighted to see many incoming developers this last couple of years, many from countries outside North America and Europe. Project Skara (and GitHub) has made things easier for newcomers, I believe.
The Board has no direct authority over technical or release decisions. It doesn't hold the copyright in OpenJDK, so it can't enforce anything copyright related either. But, aside from its ultimate power to resolve disputes, it can nudge and encourage people in the right direction. I've used my position to make representations to the Board on issues like delays to OpenJDK authorship, JEP processes, Vulnerability Group infrastructure, and so on.
I'm a working programmer, like most of the people voting in this election. I write patches, review patches, design things. I have always done my best to represent all of you, the OpenJDK members, and with your support I'll continue to do that.
- 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 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 having taken hold, our 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
OpenJDK is where I'm spending my work time and a lot of my spare time since more than 15 years. I love this project and I think it is healthy and well organized, but there's always room for improvement :) If elected into the Governing Board, I'd like to focus on improving the project's infrastructure and processes. E.g. the mail service, which is the project's main communication backbone, had several reliability issues in the past, the effectiveness of the Vulnerability Group could still be improved by a better infrastructure, the the OpenJDK website will greatly benefit from a general overhaul and the new JEP 2.0 process has still not be finalized. I'd also like to revive the "Scorecard & Annual Reports" (last done in 2014) and do a poll among OpenJDK contributors to evaluate what they like/dislike most about the project. I'll continue to contribute to OpenJDK no matter what, but I'll be happy if you empower me to also influence the project from within the Governing Board. I promise to hear your voices and give my best to further advance OpenJDK.
TL;DR
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 a commercial version of 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. I also represented SAP and currently represent Amazon in the JCP Executive Committee and served in the Java SE 9-13 Expert 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.
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, Paul Hohensee, 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.
