January 31, 2026
Paperwork vs. patches
"Giving up upstream-ing my patches & feel free to pick them up"
One year, zero signature: dev quits OpenJDK over paperwork limbo
TLDR: A developer quit trying to contribute to OpenJDK after a year of stalled Oracle paperwork and told others to rewrite his small fixes. Commenters split between dismissing the patches as trivial and torching corporate red tape, with one bold prediction that AI will push everyone to personal forks.
Open-source soap opera alert: a would‑be OpenJDK contributor says he spent a full year waiting for Oracle to approve his OCA (Oracle Contributor Agreement)—the legal form you sign before contributing—then finally quit and told others to rewrite and submit his patches without him. He even notes he lives in mainland China but has no ties to restricted entities, adding a sharp edge to the mystery. The kicker that set comment sections ablaze? An email loop of "we sincerely apologize" and repeated tags to an Oracle contact, which became an instant meme.
The crowd split fast. One camp rolled its eyes at the work itself: “trivial,” “noise,” and even 404 links that made it hard to judge, with some pointing to the Loongson fork as evidence it’s minor stuff. Others said that’s not the point—bureaucracy killed the vibe—and called this a textbook case of big‑company bottlenecks smothering small but useful fixes. “Corporate overlords” got name‑checked and plenty nodded.
Then came the jokes and future‑gazing. Commenters dubbed the saga “morbidly funny,” riffing on “monthly PR touch-ups” and the “Bureaucracy Boss Fight.” A hot take predicted that as AI writes more code, we’ll all keep personal forks and stop begging upstreams for attention. Whether or not you buy it, the mood is clear: paperwork 1, patches 0.
Key Points
- •A contributor (Bingwu Zhang) says his Oracle Contributor Agreement approval for OpenJDK has been delayed for over a year despite repeated follow-ups.
- •He received repeated apologies and internal pings to an Oracle contact but no concrete progress on the OCA review.
- •He is ceasing efforts to upstream his OpenJDK patches and invites others to reimplement and submit them due to OCA originality requirements.
- •Listed patches include: a check for broken llvm-config and increasing default thread stack size for the HotSpot Zero variant to avoid javac stack overflow when building JDK 24.
- •He also linked multiple patches to Loongson’s JDK fork, which he says were similarly blocked by the OCA requirement.