In this interview, new JCP chairman Patrick Curran discusses his goals for the JCP, what role standards play, the interactions between innovation and standardization, the impact of OpenJDK, the Java SE TCK and Apache Harmony, the shift in application servers from Java EE to SOA, future Java technology standardization, interesting and successful JSRs, and the future of the JCP.
Watch Patrick Curran discusses the Java Community Process (25 minutes).
From the interview:
[...] I think there was a feeling among people that perhaps it was a little exclusive, a little closed, things were done kind of in secret. That wasn't always the case but there was probably a tendency that way. When you are dealing with intellectual property, which is what we are dealing with, and you are dealing with large corporations, they sometimes get a little cautious about the way they do their business. But over the years the JCP has loosened up and relaxed a little, we've encouraged more individual members, we've encouraged non-profits and open source groups to join us, and the way that business is done has changed and things are now much more open than they were. I think we could go further, I will be honest. W3C and Oasis, everything is done basically out in the open. And we still get people saying: "Why can't I see the full archive of the mailing list associated with a particular expert group?" The answer is because that's up to the expert group how they do their business. We don't mandate how they work, we don't tell them they have to do it secretly, and we don't tell them they have to do it out in the open. And I think increasingly they are doing things out in the open but we need to push to encourage just a little bit. That's probably the biggest thing that I would like to see happen in the next year or two.