To: JCP Executive Committee Members From: Doug Lea Date: 22 October 2010 Dear Colleagues, Here is the promised explanation for why I am not seeking another term on the JCP Executive Committee: I believe that the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body, and there is no remaining useful role for an independent advocate for the academic and research community on the EC. Some have argued that JCP was never a credible standards body. I once disagreed: Sun initially placed in the JSPA and Process documents enough rules to ensure that the JCP could foster innovation, quality, and diversity, independent of that from Sun, with few enough (albeit annoying) exceptions to allow JCP to drive consensual progress more successfully than seen in most standards bodies. However, some of these rules, and violations of rules, have been found to be the source of stalemates and lost technical ground. Rather than fixing rules or ceasing violations, Oracle now promises to simply disregard them. If they indeed act as they have promised, then the JCP can never again become more than an approval body for Oracle-backed initiatives. (Oracle's choice of timing submission of SE release JSRs forced me to decide not to stand for another term based only on those promises, not on the actual actions.) I urge other EC members to consider whether short term "pragmatism" in voting outweighs such consequences. So, what are the alternatives? For the core Java platform (which these days roughly corresponds to Java SE), the only existing vehicle for which I can foresee a useful role for the academic and research community is OpenJDK. OpenJDK is a shared-source, not shared-spec body, so is superficially not an alternative at all. But at this point, a Linux-style model for collaboratively developed common source is likely to be more effective in meeting upcoming challenges than is the JCP. (In which case, of course, the main role of JCP is only to approve specs for various freeze-points that represent releases.) For this reason, I've volunteered to continue and increase involvement to better establish the reincarnated OpenJDK as such a body. For other efforts, I cannot recommend to anyone that they use the JCP JSR process, as opposed to some other group/organization/body, to gain consensus for proposed specifications. So I expect to see fewer submissions as people begin to realize that other venues provide better opportunities. I suppose there is some possibility that I will help improve support for such standards elsewhere, but I don't have any immediate plans. I could of course be wrong about all this, and hope that other EC members try hard to prove me wrong. I am sending this to the EC, to make sure you all hear this from me directly first. But feel free to distribute. For simplicity, I placed a copy at http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/jcp22oct10.html -Doug