Andy Tripp wrote:
Also, as FOSS developers start to contribute
to OpenJDK, I'm already seeing suggestions for changes where the
rationale seems to be "because that's
how FOSS projects do things", with of course the underlying assumption
that that makes it a reasonable approach.
That's how discussions with incomplete information work, people make
assumptions, then discuss them, and
come to conclusions based on the new information they receive during the
discussion.
At the end of the day, cool code beats heated discussions, so people who
care about their ideas deeply, will
simply go out and implement them. Discussing actual code beats
discussing ideas, since the properties of the code
can be measured, while properties of ideas are necessarily speculative.
Properties of administrative processes can be measured by the quality of
the output, and the output from Sun's processes
is able to run more applications than the output of other processes
(Classpath, Harmony, etc.), so Sun's process seems to
work just fine for producing this kind of software.
Naturally, opening up the code base leads to opportunities to reevaluate
such processes in light of the further goals of
the project, and to optimize them accordingly. Sun ended up switching
its OpenJDK development team away from
(non-free) TeamWare to (FOSS) Mercurial, for example, and that's been,
for all I've heard from Sun's engineers at
conferences and on IRC, a reasonable and quite useful thing to do,
beside being the way things are done in FOSS
projects (use the best FOSS tools to get the job done). Similarly, Sun
now has the opportunity to reevaluate the code
review tools and the bug tracker used for (Open)JDK, and to improve
their processes further to allow collaboration
to happen at more interaction points more easily, than is currently viable.
Unfortunately, such infrastructural progress, as necessary as it is as
OpenJDK evolves to tear down the 'fourth
wall' [1], is nothing the FOSS community outside Sun can really help
much with, other than contributing to the
discussion of different alternatives, as only Sun's engineers can really
know how their processes need to work
to fit well with what they are doing at their day jobs, beside OpenJDK
(the non-open JDK product, for example).
cheers,
dalibor topic
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall
