JCP and Mailing lists
Sometimes I receive emails from either JCP members or other developers interested into JCP activities.
Dave Minter wrote on his blog:
"I find it very frustrating that the JCP mailing lists are available only to members of the expert groups. Is this a matter of policy, and are there any plans to change this policy in the future? The lack of any document trail makes it very difficult to understand the reasoning behind otherwise arbitrary (or apparently arbitrary) decisions in the standards.
If there were at least a way to join a standards track as an observer, this would alleviate the problem, but currently the JCP is a "black box" process to those who are consumers of the outputs rather than participants in their development.
A large part of the value of open source is the existence of associated public mailing lists (and their archives) allowing any interested party to follow the product development. There seems to be no obvious reason why JCP does not take advantage of this open approach; surely anything that can be said within an expert group (often composed of commercial rivals) can be said publically?"
And here is my reply:
The JCP Program Office is working hard to improve the transparency of the process. There are a couple of tools that are already available to our members.
Every JSR Spec Lead is encouraged to set up an observer alias and a community update page.
It is possible to subscribe to the observer alias for any given JSR from the JSR detail page.
For example, the community update page for JSR 316 is http://jcp.org/en/egc/view?id=316 You can navigate to it from the jcp.org home page. Type the # of the JSR in the "go to JSR" box in the left navigation bar and hit enter. You will be taken to the public JSR detail page. Below the Expert Group table, the third link takes you to the community update page.
Log in using the user-id and the password you were given when you joined the JCP. From the community update page, under the "Community page communication" header, you will find the instruction on how to join the JSR 316 Observer alias.
The Program Office recommends to the Spec Leads to set up and use such tools. Should you find that no such alias exists, or that it does exists but has very little traffic, please feel free to contact the spec lead directly and request that the alias be activated and used.
We are also working on including new features on future releases of the jcp.org website aimed to improve transparency and community communication.
to which, he followed up with:
Thanks for your response, I really appreciate it. Still, I would like to emphasize that the single most valuable addition I could have as a consumer of the JCP outputs is a publically viewable archive of the JSR mailing lists. Is there any chance that this will emerge? I can view the standards documents without needing to join the JCP, after all.
And this is my reply:
As you stated in your previous message, the JCP works like a standard s body. As such, it has its own rules and processes that need to followed. One of the regulated topics is the Intellectual Property assignment.
The IP associated with the three key deliverables of any JSR (the specification, the Reference Implementation and the Technology Compatibility Kit) is assigned to the Spec Lead. It is entirely up to the Spec Lead to decide which license to use when the JSR finally reaches the Final stage.
Some Spec Leads choose Open Source licenses, some other don't. All the conversations that happen between Expert Group members pertain to "Work in progress" that sometimes does not have the licenses well defined just yet.
As such, it may be in the best interest of the JSR itself to keep the discussion between the members. Sometimes there can even be Non Disclosure Agreements involved. This is the current status.
The JCP is constantly trying to improve and JSR306 (the Process Document that defines the framework within which JSRs are developed) is being evolved. One if its goals is to increase transparency of the JCP as well as increase individual participation.
Hopefully this short email exchange will trigger some more conversation and provide further input to the EG for JSR306...
