Apache Harmony?
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkTuesday, January 3, 2006
In the new year lets look back to Apache Harmony, the much publicised effort to create “open source” J2SE announced in early May last year.
After eight months there is still nothing to show, no downloads. The website is sparsely populated. Only four contributors are listed (where is the fulltime IBM employee?). The only recognizable company of two listed is Intel. Intel developing JVM? That ought to tell you about the current state of affairs.
The roadmap is non existent. Personally I expected at least to find the roapmap.
The FAQ is lame. The only item which raised my eyebrows was:
10) Do you have any code to start?
———————————–No, we don’t. We didn’t want to “bless” any given implementation that might be donated (if such a thing could happen) but would rather let the community decide how it will create and develop the platform.
The only thing worth noting is the herculean barrier they have placed to become a contributor to this project.
First you have to complete a “standard” Apache individual contributor license agreement.
To become an Authorized Contributor, each committer is required to complete the
Authorized Contributor Questionnaire and submit to the
Harmony PMC. Also each committer is “encouraged” to have their employer execute a
Apache Corporate Contributor License Agreement. It surely smells like IBM. It is probably easier for an Al Queda operative to join FBI or be a whitehouse intern.
There is no timeline anywhere. Can we at least expect it in this decade?
In my humble opinion - The King is Dead; Long Live The King.