Governing Board Minutes: 2013/4/25

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 25 April 2013 at 16:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. Eclipse IP policy (Mike)
  2. Infrastructure update (Georges and Mark)
  3. Any other business

All five Board members were present: Georges Saab, John Duimovich, Andrew Haley, Doug Lea, and Mark Reinhold.

Both Observers were present: Mike Milinkovich and Ed Lynch.

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. Eclipse IP policy

Mike went over two presentations which described the The Eclipse Foundation’s IP policy.

The first presentation described the Eclipse development process. Slides covered the project life cycle, release types and frequency, and a description of the release review. There were several sides describing the release plan, milestone builds, the IP log, review documentation, PMC/EMO review, community review, and results dissemination. The slide describing the IP log stimulated some conversation. Doug wanted to know more details about the IP team. Mike said that at the present it consisted of three people led by an attorney with an IP background. They use tools to vet every third party library that an Eclipse project wishes to use. After the presentation Andrew commented that it appears that Eclipse is very cautious. Mike replied that they verify that all third party libraries use licenses that Eclipse is comfortable with. He noted that all output from every Eclipse project is meant to be commercially ready so that it can be used by licensed products.

The second presentation was an example of a release-review document provided by the EGit and JGit projects. Mike said it was one of the better examples. The deck contained slides describing the project including the historical context, committer diversity, a list of features and committers, bug metrics, and finally the IP log for the technology. Mike walked the Board through the IP logs for the project, which were the transitive closure of all libraries included in the project’s release. Doug wished such in-depth evaluation wasn’t required. Mike guided the Board to the section describing the contributions organized by contributor which was generated by a tool. Georges asked whether the transitive closure was supposed to be determined in advance by the contributor. Mike replied that it was mostly handled by the IP team. Andrew wanted to know whether projects communicated, for instance, to determine library versions. Mike replied saying that communication occurred for projects that were part of the simultaneous release.

Doug wondered how this was applicable to the OpenJDK Community. He liked that the Eclipse system seemed to allow for public discussion as IP reviews take place. Georges assured Doug that in OpenJDK the discussions take place, but they aren’t public at present. Mike pointed out that the Oracle legal staff could access all of Eclipse records since Oracle was a strategic member of Eclipse. Mark suggested that he didn’t think that OpenJDK needed to replicate the entire Eclipse process.

2. Infrastructure update

Mark provided a brief update saying that the wiki is now available and in use.

For the bug system, Mark indicated that he expected a summer roll-out. Currently the team is trying to resolve identity issues and wished to ask the Board’s opinion. He said that in the new system, user names are primary keys that can never be changed. Mark was concerned that somebody might claim a name, never use it, and thereby prevent the use of that name by someone else. One possible solution would be to use e-mail addresses as user names. Mike reminded people that e-mail addresses change, particularly due to changes in employment. Ed claimed that there were two sets of people, those who cared about retaining their identity and those that did not. Mark asked whether it would make sense to give Committers usernames and everybody else e-mail addresses. Doug thought that all of the options seemed reasonable.

3. Any other business

None raised.

At this point the Board adjourned.