2023 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.
The two-week nomination period for candidates to fill those seats is now open. It will end at 23:00 UTC on Tuesday, 14 March 2023.
During this time any OpenJDK Member may nominate an individual who does 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 may make more than one such nomination.
To nominate someone, send an e-mail message to members at openjdk dot org with the subject line "GB Nomination: $NAME", where $NAME is the full name of the person you're nominating. Use the body of the message to make the best case you can for your nominee.
Nominees must accept their nominations by the start of voting. Those who do accept will be invited to submit short candidate statements to be posted below.
Voting will start on Wednesday, 15 March 2023 and run for two weeks. All OpenJDK Members as of the start of the voting period will be eligible to vote. Detailed information on voting logistics will be available shortly.
Candidates
Three individuals were nominated, and each accepted his nomination. The candidate's own statement is as follows:
- Andrew Haley, Red Hat
I've been an elected member of the OpenJDK Governing Board for as long as there has been one, and I am very grateful to the people who have supported me over the years.
This is always a good moment to look at how we're doing. We're still attracting valuable contributions from developers all over the world, which is great to see. The Governing Board, although it has no "direct authority over technical or release decisions," oversees the health of the community, and must keep a close watch to make sure this works well.
There are still some pain points. In particular, the decision-making process can still be rather opaque. I'd like to see a more transparent way that an enthusiastic contributor can determine early whether a contribution is likely to become part of the JDK.
My own recent work on Project Loom has given me fresh insights into the way large changes to the core JDK are made. It's unfortunately still unusual for people outside Oracle to work at that level. I'd like more "outsiders" to help with the heavy lifting in the JDK.
As I've said several times before:
My goals remains 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'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.
- Phil Race, Oracle
I am pleased to stand for election as an at-large member of the OpenJDK Governing Board.
For those that do not know me I'd like to tell a little about my history with OpenJDK. I know Java the platform, the ecosystem, and also many of the developers and other involved in OpenJDK. I have been closely involved with JDK development for over 25 years - since before OpenJDK - in various roles but most of it developing the Java desktop client APIs. I have seen the evolution of Java into the success it is today and observed the role it played in shaping the software industry and the transition of JDK into OpenJDK. Along the way I have made contributions in that effort, including being part of the team working on creation of the entirely open source JDK back in 2007. I've always had a developer role as a contributor, reviewer and lead for OpenJDK projects, creating and maintaining APIs for multiple OpenJDK projects, and being a CSR reviewer. And prior to OpenJDK I have been a JSR expert group lead under the JCP. And I have given numerous technical presentations at more JavaOne conferences than I can remember.
OpenJDK is a community of developers, and I believe the at-large members of the Governing Board should be active developers within the various OpenJDK projects. As such, my long and continuing contributions in that role as well as leadership of OpenJDK groups and projects have supplied me with a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to be a valuable member of the Governing Board.
No one at Oracle solicited me to stand in this election, I am standing because I believe I can understand and represent the views of the whole OpenJDK community. To back that up, if anyone ever has a question they would like the Governing Board to consider and it is within the purview of the board, they can email me and if it seems like it is in the interest of the community, I will ask the board to take it up for discussion.
There are several themes which I see the governing board as responsible for to ensure the continued success of OpenJDK, and these include stewardship, fostering co-operation, professionalism and ensuring sufficient infrastructure, and I will bear these in mind during my tenure.
Thank you for reading this and thank you in advance if you vote for me.
- Volker Simonis, Amazon
This was my first year on the Governing Board and I enjoyed it :) I actively participated in all GB meetings and, among others, I pushed to finalize the JEP 2.0 Process (which may eventually and up as "JEP 3.0 Process" now :)), advocated for Markdown in JBS issues, proposed to add GitHub user names to the OpenJDK Census and brought up recurring issues with the email lists and archives (see the GB meeting minutes for more details).
I'd be happy if you give me your vote to serve one more period in the OpenJDK Governing Board because OpenJDK is still the place where I'm spending my work and a lot of my spare time since more than 15 years. While I love this project and I think it is healthy and well organized, there's always room for improvement :) Next year I'd like to focus on further infrastructure improvements and especially on the smooth integration of parts of the GraalVM project (which is currently governed by it's own Advisory Board) into the OpenJDK. For those of you who want to know a little bit more about my background, I've attached a short CV below:
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 220+ commits), Reviewer (with (280+ 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.
