The Boards are comparable only in their mediocrity

The code for the development branch of the JDK, JDK 7, has been posted almost two years ago on http://openjdk.java.net, and has been open source since, with Sun and the rest of the OpenJDK community working hard to first replace the few left over binary blobs from third parties that didn't want to give Sun the necessary rights to publish their source code as open source components of OpenJDK. Then the OpenJDK community proceeded to build a fully free, compatible and (of course!) open source implementation of Java SE 6, OpenJDK 6, working together with the IcedTea project, which is basically what's in your distribution today. Two years of hard work by Sun employees as well as employees of Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Aicas and many outstanding individual hackers like Karl Helgason, both within OpenJDK, and outside it.

Collaboration - it works, people.

With these two very successful efforts behind its belt, the OpenJDK project now is increasingly focusing on JDK 7. So go check out Mark Reinhold's talk ( http://www.archive.org/details/fosdem_2009_free_java_the_... ) at the Java Libre dev room at FOSDEM conference for details, that was kindly recorded and published online by Andrew Hughes.

This sort of confusion keeps coming up. There seem to be different meanings that different people are using for the word "open".

* open source? The four projects mentioned are already publicly distributed under open source licences.
* open development practices? I don't know about this. Does MySQL-in-Sun have open development practices? Did MySQL-before-Sun have open development practices? What *are* open development practices? This is a serious question -- I'd like to know the community consensus on this.
* nice friendly people? I used to think Sun was populated by nasty jerks, but recently I've started to like some of them more and more. I guess reading someone's blog will do that to you -- make you like them more. Do you like anybody who works for Sun? Does it matter to the definition of "open"?
* outside contributors? Surely an open source project is more robust when it has outside contributors, but is that what people mean when they say "Open"? I know of a lot of open source projects -- the vast majority of them, actually -- which never got outside contribution beyond token amounts. Should we say that those projects weren't "open"?

As far as I can tell, the only meaning that is easy to judge is "open source", and the four projects named are already clearly open source. The other meanings might be really important, too, of course, but it isn't clear to me what they mean in this conversation.

Maybe the real issue that shieldsd is concerned about has something to do with corporate strategic direction-setting. That, too, is a very important issue, but maybe we should use a different word than "open" to refer to the degree to which a project is independent from a single corporation's influence.