4fe251d1_nJDK_Governance___Wild_Webmink__Evaluation
[Rule] Open, Meritocratic Oligarchy [Data] “The Governing Board consists of ﬁve individuals: The Chair, appointed by Oracle; The Vice-Chair, appointed by IBM; The OpenJDK Lead, appointed by Oracle; and Two At-Large Members, nominated and elected as described below.” [Score] -2 [Evaluation] 
This is initially a closed plutocracy comprising mostly people who have never been involved in OpenJDK, as long-term Free Java leader Mark Wielaard has pointed out. The initial Board is all appointed by Oracle and IBM and they have picked only people they can trust to represent them and taken few risks (only Doug Lea has spoken out in the past, when he resigned from the JCP) and omitted key OpenJDK contributors Red Hat and Google (and recent joiner Apple). Future Boards will always comprise at least two Oracle staff and one IBM member. Interestingly, this is not conformant with the original OpenJDK Charter, which gave a majority of seats to elected representatives. There is scope for the Board to be grown in the future and it’s theoretically possible eventually for the Board to have community-appointed members outnumbering the Oracle-IBM axis, but the rules are poorly defined and there’s undoubtedly scope for them to be gamed in order to maintain control. Scoring 0 for closed/open given the benefit of doubt for the possible expansion process; -1 for non-meritocratic majority; -1 for non-representative oligarchy.
☆ Rating OpenJDK Governance | Wild Webmink
Evaluation