I’m just off the plane back from the FOSDEM 2007 conference in Brussels, where I participated in the GNU Classpath+OpenJDK DevJam organized by Mark Wielaard. This was a great opportunity to meet more members of the Free Java community and really begin talking about how we can work together on the OpenJDK project.

To start the OpenJDK session I presented an overview (slides here) of Sun’s goals and plans for the project, discussed the relationship between the JCP and OpenJDK, explained a bit about Sun’s current JDK engineering processes (and how they’re best served by a distributed source-code management system rather than a centralized one), and finally finished up with some thoughts and questions about bug-tracking systems and governance models. My colleagues Igor Nekrestyanov (2D), Peter Kessler (HotSpot VM), Peter von der Ahé (Java compiler), and David Herron (Quality) then spoke briefly about their respective areas.

It was a fun session—more of a 3½-hour conversation, really—and we received lots of useful feedback. Thanks, guys!