Mike Milinkovich

In September 2017 Oracle announced that it would be migrating governance of the Java EE platform to the Eclipse Foundation, the home of MicroProfile. Two years later Jakarta EE 8 shipped, signaling the successful completion of that move. As a result, Free Java has a new home for a significant piece of the Java ecosystem. A home which is purely open source, vendor neutral, and community led.

This talk will be about how the long and painful journey from Java EE to Jakarta EE unfolded. But more importantly it will focus on how the new Jakarta EE community works, and how there is a new, open, specification process for Java APIs (other than SE) that is available for the community. We are looking forward to welcoming many of those interested in Free Java to participate in driving new innovation in Java APIs for cloud and other exciting use cases.

It is generally assumed that free and open source communities are best served by governance rules that are open and transparent. I will argue that while openness and transparency are necessary, they are not sufficient. Particularly as the number of open source communities governed by trade associations grows, additional principles are necessary such as vendor neutrality, and ensuring a level playing field. This talk will provide an overview of the (often legal) control points that exist in open communities, and various strategies used by corporations to seize them. It will also provide some examples of existing community governance rules which openly and transparently ensure special rights to particular organizations. A few simple governance hacks to help make trade associations better stewards of open communities will also be discussed.

By any measure, Eclipse has been a very successful open source community, and it has certainly contributed immensely to the worldwide success of Java. It has also been for many years, one of best examples of a vendor-neutral, free Java community. But there is one thing in particular that sets Eclipse apart: it ALWAYS ships on time. For eight straight years, the Eclipse community has shipped its major release on time to the day. How the heck does that work? This talk will focus on the processes, community interactions, and most importantly, the cultural aspects of Eclipse that makes this possible. The not-so-subliminal message is that OpenJDK would be well served to emulate Eclipse in its predictability.