“Active membership in the Java Community Process (JCP) can be
extremely valuable for an IT company, in terms of directly helping
to advance the Java standard and for bringing international
attention, respect, and prestige to the company itself. But, as is
inevitable in large organizations, politics has caused an unseemly
stench in the JCP, and things have changed big time in the
community the last few years.“Back in January, I wrote an article for C/net’s Builder.com on
why Java developers were becoming disenchanted with the JCP, one of
the few community organizations that uses a version number
(currently 2.5). Whereas it started out as a friendly little
community in which people knew everybody else by their first names
and worked together fairly harmoniously as a team to move the
standard ahead, in recent years it had become Java the Hutt–fat,
slow-moving, and not too friendly to outsiders…”