| Re: [ee4j-pmc] PMC Minutes |
The intent is bottom up, truly. Or as best as we can get with our non-existent specification process, incomplete projects, no clear definition of what replaces an Expert Group or how it should work, and still no legal rights to the javax namespace and all the complications that brings. That "best" would be pretty low quality and non-permanent at this point in time, but there is a strong desire to find some way to get people engaged despite the very obvious obstacles. The intent is to take a baby steps forward because if we don't the result will be that everything will be waiting on everything. I.e. the goal is anything but a deadlock, which is what we have. It isn't clear how to untangle all of this so any correspondence should be read with the perspective all steps are temporary and we're pulling at strings in a knot. The general desire: - Start getting some technical direction - Have that come from the projects - Specification Committee would just dictate process (JCP-like) not technical direction Some of the obstacles: - We can't legally take contributions yet, because we don't legally own javax.* in any form nor do we have patent rights to any of the specifications - We already know the standard Eclipse Contributor Agreement doesn't provide enough rights to support a standards process, so any ideas we discuss now in the projects could be legally questionable in the future. - We've only had two Specification Committee meetings (2 hours total) and are gaining consensus that group shouldn't be setting technical direction and it should come from whatever replaces Expert Groups. More time needed for that to get more firm and it's clear as you say the groups we do have are barely enough to seed the future "Expert Group" regardless. - There've been over 250 participants in the various EE-related Expert Groups in the last 18 years, which presents primarily a scale issue and more recently a legal issue. The scale issue is Eclipse has never onboarded so many at once and is already overwhelmed. The second is the JCP/Oracle has no legal rights to give the contact information for 250 people to Eclipse given the new GDPR laws. The results make things hard. This email is as imperfect as the situation, so full of holes and I haven't listed everyone's thoughts on how to overcome the obstacles. There are many, but instead I'll just encourage people here to write some. It definitely won't hurt. On the technical direction, ideally that's something that can be done in the coming weeks (not days) and to the best we can reflect people's thoughts. Ideally we can be comfortable with the unclear rules/lines and use this as an exercise to start inching towards some clear rules/lines. I think at minimum something like JSR description is what we need. If someone wants to grab that and take a stab at filtering out the parts that wouldn't apply or filing in anything new we might want to ask of future specifications, that would be very helpful. Goal is to have a basic template and hand it to all the spec projects and say "fill this in to the best of your ability." I should probably start a new thread, but ideally we'd have the template ideas by next Tuesday. Not spend too long on what it should be, then give a couple weeks to the projects to fill it in. That won't be perfect, but I suspect it would be a considerable help in the efforts to move the specification process definition forward. -David |