Hi Paul,
We find your request to be extremely concerning and disquieting.
You have told us that the Eclipse Foundation has, behind closed doors, entered into an agreement with a single vendor that requires one of your new projects to distribute only binaries built purely from that vendor's OpenJDK project, and prevents the inclusion of other open source projects (including your own well established and widely used OpenJ9 project) unless they enter into a presumably commercial relationship with that same vendor to procure access to their proprietary TCK tests.
We would like to confirm that we have understood the request properly. Our understanding had been that Eclipse, according to its own by-laws, is a "not-for-profit association that provides vendor-neutral, open development of open source technologies, specifications, platforms, runtimes, frameworks and tools (collectively the "Eclipse Technology")." [1].
The "Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook" [2] defines the Foundation's "Openness" and "Vendor neutrality" guiding principles as:
- "Openness at Eclipse means quite a lot more than "open book" (which is really a synonym for transparent). The project is open to all; Eclipse provides the same opportunity to all. Everyone participates with the same rules; there are no rules to exclude any potential contributors which include, of course, direct competitors in the marketplace."
- "Vendor neutrality is similar to openness in that it's concerned with maintaining a level playing field. No vendor is permitted to dominate a project, and nobody can be excluded from participating in a project based on their employment status. While project resources will contain copyright statements that assert ownership of various assets by individual vendors, the project itself must remain vendor neutral."
From the Adoptium Project Charter link [3] you provided:
1. The Java SE TCKs licensed to the Eclipse Adoptium project by Oracle will be used solely to test Java SE implementations that in each case are based on OpenJDK code and include only HotSpot based Java Runtime Environments sourced from the OpenJDK project, or any natural successor thereof sourced from the OpenJDK project, and no other Java Virtual Machine. For the avoidance of doubt, the testing of any Java Runtime Environment incorporating content from the OpenJ9 Project, Oracle's GraalVM project(s) or any successors of either of the foregoing, except to the extent present in any future version of the Java SE
reference implementation from Oracle, is not licensed under such Java SE TCKs.
2. The Eclipse Adoptium project will distribute, market or promote only open source Java SE implementations that are licensed for and have passed a Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit licensed from Oracle. Any intermediate builds made available by the Eclipse Adoptium project must follow notice requirements provided by the Eclipse Foundation which make it clear that such builds are intermediate and have not been tested for compatibility.
This request - and the agreement the Foundation entered into with Oracle - appears to violate at least the spirit of those principles by limiting opportunity for some projects, providing different rules for different projects, and tilting the playing field towards a single competitor. Moreover, OpenJ9 was kept "in the dark" (which is really an *antonym* for transparent) until our project had already been pushed aside and disavantaged by the restrictions to which the Eclipse Foundation has agreed that were imposed by this one vendor.
Would you please clarify how this agreement is compatible with the Eclipse principles of openness and vendor neutrality?
Finally, to quibble the details: that page states that "[t]he Eclipse Adoptium project will distribute, market or promote...". OpenJ9 is not part of the Adoptium project. So would you also please clarify why **Adoptium's** restrictions apply to the **OpenJ9** project? We don't currently have any Adoptium links (only AdoptOpenJDK links).
----- Original message -----
From: Paul Buck <paul.buck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: "openj9-dev" <openj9-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: openj9-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc:
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [openj9-dev] OpenJ9 project website change request
Date: Thu, Jan 21, 2021 14:18
Dear OpenJ9 Project Leaders,
With the recent creation of the Eclipse Adoptium top-level project as the new home for the AdoptOpenJDK runtimes, the Eclipse Foundation entered into an agreement with Oracle for the Java SE TCK. The agreement requires Eclipse to distribute, market or promote only open source Java SE implementations that are licensed for and have passed a Java SE TCK. For reference see the Licensing section of the Eclipse Adoptium charter.
Our request to the OpenJ9 project is to update your project page to remove the text that promotes grabbing a pre-built binary of OpenJDK with OpenJ9 and the link button to AdoptOpenJDK. The text and link can be reinstated to download a pre-built Java SE runtime with OpenJ9 if and when that is available as a compatible implementation from IBM.
Thanks … Paul
