As promised last week I’ve posted a draft of the OpenJDK Bylaws.

The Bylaws are intended to be a written set of rules that will “foster the long-term health and growth of the Community by enabling and encouraging its members to act in an open, transparent, and meritocratic manner.” We’ve attempted to define efficient, lightweight rules that are aligned with how the Community operates today, under the interim guidelines for Groups and Projects established in 2007.

This is a starting point, not a done deal. There are numerous bugs and missed corner cases in this draft and, no doubt, even more numerous ways in which it can be improved. Please send questions, comments, and suggestions to the gb-discuss list. (If you haven’t already subscribed to that list then please do so first, otherwise your message will be discarded as spam.)

I’ll revise the draft in response to comments over the next four weeks, until 3 March 2011. After the draft is finished it will be offered to OpenJDK Community members for ratification via an appropriate democratic process.

Governing Board members The Bylaws define a Governing Board which “oversees the structure, operation, and overall health of the Community. It upholds and maintains these Bylaws, resolves procedural disputes, and ensures that sufficient infrastructure is available to Community members. The Governing Board has no direct authority over technical or release decisions.”

The members of the initial Governing Board are:

• Adam Messinger (Chair, Oracle),
• Jason Gartner (Vice Chair, IBM),
• Prof. Doug Lea (At-Large, SUNY Oswego),
• Mike Milinkovich (At-Large, Eclipse), and
• Yours truly (OpenJDK Lead, Oracle).

At-Large members serve for a term of one calendar year. After the first year they’ll be nominated and elected by a democratic process open to all key members of the Community.