Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• In the area of governance, I'll suspend judgement on a new Community Advisory Group, perhaps it'll be good, lets see.
• In the are of licensing - again, we see something that sounds wonderful, Jim writes: (my emphasis)

  This SCA goes a long way in addressing a variety of concerns with the current agreement. The most community friendly aspect of moving to the SCA is the inclusion of language stating that any contribution licensed out by Sun will also be licensed under an OSI or FSF approved license.

  So - lets look at the most community friendly piece, in this carefully reviewed document; is it so ? does it really meet Simon's claim "... so that proprietary-only forks are impossible.". It's good to link to Sun's FAQ but what about reading the actual agreement text. Lets start with clause 1 (IANAL etc. etc.):

  1. "Contribution" means any source code, object code, patch, tool, sample, graphic, specification, manual, documentation, or any other material posted or submitted by You to a Project.

  So far so simple, (and AFAICS an improvement on the JCA, it removes the unclear delivery / acceptance language). What about clause 2 (my emphasis):

  2. You hereby assign to Sun joint ownership in all worldwide common law and statutory rights associated with the copyrights, copyright applications and copyright registrations in Your Contribution. You understand that (i) this Agreement may be submitted by Sun to register a copyright in Your Contribution, and (ii) Sun may exercise all rights as a copyright owner of Your Contribution, including enforcement against infringers. You hereby grant to Sun, to the extent that the foregoing assignment is or becomes void, ineffective or unenforceable, a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under such copyrights, including sublicensing those rights to third parties through multiple tiers of sublicensees or other licensing mechanisms at Sun's option. Whether by assignment or license, both parties to this Agreement shall be able to do all such things in relation to Your Contribution as if each of us respectively were the sole owners of the copyrights therein. Neither party has any duty whatsoever to consult with, obtain the consent of, pay or render an accounting to the other party for any use or distribution of a Contribution or derivative work thereof. To the extent allowable under applicable local laws and copyright conventions, You agree never to assert against Sun or its licensees or transferees any moral rights in Your Contribution. Any Contribution that Sun subsequently makes available under any license will also be made available under a suitable FSF- or OSI-approved license.

  Well there it is; I guess what you would expect in a joint copyright assignment - though comparing to the JCA, the 'much improved' nature seems to revolve mostly around: "... several layers of agreement, so that if one proves to be unenforceable in some jurisdiction, there are other layers ..." (Simon Phipps), ie. it is longer and stronger.
• So - what about "The most community friendly ..." piece of this stronger assignment of rights to Sun ? lets look at that final sentence, in-lining & special casing the hacker's interest from clause 1 above:

  Any Contribution [ any source code submitted by You to a Project ] that Sun subsequently makes available under any license will also be made available under a suitable FSF- or OSI-approved license.

  So ... Sun covenants to make your (own) code submission available under an FSF/OSI approved license. I guess that is good: but since you already submitted your source code under such a license how does that help re-assure the contributor ? Again, it seems to me that this requirement is fully satisfied simply by a public archive of contributed patches, and does nothing at all to stop proprietary forks. At best, the commitment is slightly easier to fulfill if Sun chooses an FSF/OSI approved license for a project.
• Then again, IANAL, and must be mis-understanding this somehow, perhaps some kindly lawyer with a ministry to the bewildered can help me out. So - Jim asked for comments, my comment is: I'm confused - why is this so good, and who is it good for ?

    // Unless you do this, obviously you don't deserve to have anything work
    rtl::OString aCfg( "CFG_INIFILE=" +
                       rtl::OUStringToOString( curWd, RTL_TEXTENCODING_UTF8 ) +
                       "/configmgrrc" );
    fprintf (stderr, "Env '%s'\n", aCfg.getStr());
    putenv( (char *)aCfg.getStr() );