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When the JCP was formed, Curran says, "Sun was basically the leader of all the development efforts, all of the intellectual property accrued to Sun. The assumption was people would license technology from Sun." Executive committee members, such as HP and IBM, thus "defined the governance model that says the IP rights accrue to the specification lead. They also decided that the specification lead gets to choose how they license the technologies they develop," Curran says.
Sun is the spec lead for only about one-third of active or recently completed Java Specification Requests (JSRs). But Sun holds major power because it is the spec lead for the three fundamental platforms of Java technology -- Java Micro Edition (Java ME), Java Standard Edition (Java SE), and Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE). Given the time and effort the work of a spec lead requires, Curran says you could argue Sun's dominant position within the JCP is justified.
The JCP has become far more open over the years, as half of all JSRs are now being done as open source projects, and many are using open mailing lists, wikis, or blogs to bring more people into the process, Curran adds.
"The days when people could sit in a closed room and have private discussion about new technology are over," Curran says. "That's not the right way to do it."
While Sun pays the salaries of JCP staff members, fees charged to JCP member organizations help offset that cost. At some point, the JCP might be completely independent of Sun, Curran says.
"I think we're probably moving in the direction of being an independent organization. But I think we've probably got a ways to go," Curran says. Magnusson says he believes the JCP should be released from Sun, but notes that he is not actively pushing for this to happen. He says current proposals to open up the process don't go far enough in "re-architecting the underlying legal, foundational structure of the JCP, which I think is the core problem."
Even within Sun, there are those who say it's time to release the JCP. Tim Bray, the director of Web technologies at Sun, used his blog to urge his own company to "let [Java] go already" and "set the JCP free [and] turn it over to the community."
While the process isn't always smooth, Gartner analyst Mark Driver says it's been beneficial to Java technology on the whole.
"The big complaint obviously with the JCP is it's a relatively bureaucratic process," Driver says. "I personally think the JCP has done a very good job in streamlining the process It's been good enough for the likes of IBM, SAP, Oracle and BEA, and many, many others."
Gavin King, a fellow at JBoss and the spec lead for JSR 299: Web Beans (recently renamed to Java Contexts and Dependency Injection), voices support for Sun and says the company has actually given up too much power over the Java platform. The JCP suffers from a "real crisis in leadership," he says.
"I think Sun has ceded too much control over the process," King says. "Democracy is a horrible means of producing technology. You need leadership. You need someone with a vision of what the technology should look like."
When a group consists of people who all think their strategies are the best and have equal control over the process, nothing gets done, King argues. Even if the JCP were to favor Sun's interests at the expense of others, at least the technology would be moving forward, King argues. A leader can accept feedback, but must ultimately make decisions on its own, he says.
"The real danger is not that some people's concerns will go unaddressed, but that no one's concerns get addressed and the platform stagnates," he says. But others say it is Sun's dominant position that poses a threat to Java technology.