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Opening up the Java Community Process

Java standards body's growing pains reflect a community in transition

By Jon Brodkin, JavaWorld.com, 03/13/09

Page 3 of 3

OSGi and Project Jigsaw

"The problem with the JCP is it is not an independent organization. JCP is a department within Sun," says Peter Kriens, owner of the software consultancy aQute. "And if you sign a contract with the JCP you actually sign a contract with Sun. The intellectual property rules are very simple. Simplistically said, everything generated in the specification work is given to Sun."

Kriens is also director of technology for the OSGi Alliance, a 10-year-old consortium with members such as IBM, Red Hat, Nokia, Oracle, Sun, Hitachi, Samsung, and SAP. JSR 291, OSGi, is a dynamic module system for Java that is intended to ensure interoperability of applications and services. Kriens and others, such as the Eclipse Foundation, were upset with Sun when the company developed a competing modular Java specification, JSR 277.

Competition, in this case, is not a good thing for the Java technology, Kriens says. "This is one of the few areas where we really want to have a single specification, because as a community it means you can work together," he says. "Sun is fragmenting the Java world."

Sun has put JSR 277 on hold, saying that creating a new module system was "not the right thing to do." Kriens expressed optimism about JSR 294, a related proposal that covers the language aspect of modularity. But he remains worried about Sun putting the JSR 277 technology into the OpenJDK for Java 7, a possibility he compared to Microsoft defeating Netscape by embedding Internet Explorer into Windows.

Checks, balances, and NDAs

Sacha Labourey, CTO of Red Hat's JBoss division, urges fundamental changes stripping Sun of its influence over the JCP.

"The JCP needs to be much more transparent. The JCP needs to have no master," Labourey says. "Sun should not have any veto power" over the three core Java platforms.

Labourey says the key platforms should be managed by committees of equals, without Sun or any other company being the specification lead.

With Sun laying employees off because of financial problems, the company's control limits progress in the technology, he says. Labourey says the JSPA had to be altered a few years ago to accommodate his company's open source business model, but the process was contentious and lengthy.

"The JCP has first and foremost existed to accommodate Sun," Labourey says. "Every time we were facing an issue, the problem was not to solve the issue but to solve the issue in a way that accommodates Sun's business model."

He also criticizes rules preventing executive committee members from discussing internal discussions publicly. "I won't be able to tell you what's being discussed in the JCP [executive committee] because we are forced into a nondisclosure agreement," Labourey says. "It's very opaque."

Kaul agrees executive committee discussions should be public, while noting that such a change would need approval from the committee at large, which includes representatives from Apache, the Eclipse Foundation, Red Hat, SAP, Oracle, SpringSource, IBM, HP, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and numerous others. The committee did agree in September to start posting full minutes and meeting materials online, rather than just summaries.

Kaul objects to people saying Sun is in absolute control of the JCP. "There are some clauses that give Sun slightly more options than it gives anybody else," Kaul says, "but there are also checks and balances so if Sun crosses a line somewhere the rest of the members have the ability to stop Sun in its tracks."

In individual JSR expert groups, the specification leads are given leeway both in how they communicate to the public and whether their end product will be open source. While maybe half of new JSRs are open source, there is no consensus yet on whether the organization should mandate open source across the board and in that case what type of open source license should be used, Curran says.

One thing Sun and other JCP members seem to agree on is that Java would benefit from more input by rank-and-file developers, as opposed to large corporations. Curran says reviewing the details of new specifications is not the most exciting work, but he hopes that a Java user group will someday be represented on the executive committee, the members of which are determined by election.

In the next few months the JCP will roll out a new version of its Web site with enhanced collaboration tools, and plans outreach efforts to get Java users more involved, Curran says.

Read more about Core Java in JavaWorld's Core Java section.