A contributor to the OpenJDK project, identified as Bingwu Zhang (xtex), announced via the hotspot-dev mailing list that they are ceasing efforts to upstream their code patches due to an unresolved Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) submission.
Zhang initiated the process approximately one year prior, expecting the standard CLA signing to take only a few days, but instead encountered significant administrative delays. After submitting the initial paperwork, subsequent follow-ups to opensource@ww.grp at oracle.com over several months reportedly yielded only acknowledgments without substantive progress.
This administrative bottleneck has effectively blocked the integration of several potentially useful technical contributions into the main OpenJDK repository. The developer noted that they have lost the necessary interest and available time to continue pursuing the upstream integration.
The unresolved OCA submission has also impacted work related to specific hardware architectures, including patches intended for Loongson's fork of the JDK. Zhang explicitly stated they reside in Mainland China and do not possess any relationships restricted by US export control laws, suggesting the delay is not due to known compliance issues.
As a resolution, Zhang invited the community to freely adopt and resubmit the stalled patches, even suggesting they be rewritten entirely to satisfy the OCA requirement that contributions must be original works of authorship. This action effectively transfers ownership of the development effort to other interested parties.
Among the abandoned contributions are fixes for potential issues with the 'llvm-config' utility and an extension to the default thread stack size to prevent stack overflow exceptions during the compilation of JDK 24 with zero variants. These represent tangible technical setbacks for the project's maintenance.
The situation highlights the friction that administrative overhead, particularly concerning legal agreements like the OCA, can impose on open-source contribution velocity. While necessary for legal clarity, such protracted review cycles can discourage valuable external developer engagement.
Moving forward, the community must now decide whether to take up these specific patches or if the precedent set by this year-long delay will deter other international contributors from engaging with the formal OpenJDK contribution pipeline.
