After having read the Long Live Swing thread, I extended the idea to the possibility of contributing code to Swing. I'm aware of the numerous issues that would arise: confidentiality, licensing, copyrights, etc. Such a community could work with an executive committee, alike the JCP one for instance. The committee, elected by the community, would accept or reject Swing Change Request. So I contacted Amy Fowler to get comments on such foolish idea. I did not get the answer I expected... it is better than I thought:
We are working on a plan which would allow more direct contributions to swing/j2se. Stay tuned.
Now, I think this is a cool idea but I'm curious what the overhead will be. I've talked with people at Sun about doing this before. You run into all kinds of things like testing issues. Outside of bugfixes, what does new code gain besides exposure? Lets take FormLayout which is already open source. As Karsten has said before, he likes being able to change it when he sees fit. If it were part of the JDK there would be limitations to when changes could be rolled out. Is the increased visibility of being part of the JDK worth this trade off?
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