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20050507 Saturday May 07, 2005

Harmony tunes up

I'd like to add my welcome to the Harmony project, a proposal (which I assume will be approved) over the Apache Incubator to grow a new, independent, up-to-date and 100% compatible implementation of v5 the Java platform. Things like this (and the new openness of the v6 - Mustang - work) renew my confidence in the promise of the Java community - read the FAQ to see more. This is just the sort of responsible, community-led evolution that the JCP rules were changed to facilitate.

Update: A positive and interesting posting from Sun's Java leader Graham Hamilton who comments "We'll probably participate in the project at some level". This two-track approach may well be the ideal thing for the future of the Java platform.

Posted by webmink ( May 07 2005, 06:16:50 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
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Comments:

At first I wasn't sure, but now I understand that an independent 100% compatible implementation is a really good thing. Even though Sun's Java implementation is very widely-deployed, some people could still view it as a single-sourced technology (i.e., everyone still gets it from java.sun.com). Having Harmony around, especially if it passes the conformance tests, would make Java even more attractive than it already is.

Posted by Anon on May 08, 2005 at 11:54 AM PDT #

Actually it's important to realise that there are already many Java implementations around, and that it's not just Sun that is providing them - in that sense the assertion that it's "single source" is wrong. However, almost all of them are derived from the implementation Sun creates in one way or another, so it would be fair to suggest that Harmony will improve diversity. There are two other important reasons I think Harmony is a good thing:

  1. It will act as a bridge between the (rather too well separated) freedom communities centred around the JCP and the FSF, allowing more - well - harmony and co-operation. This is a big step, it will take respect and a willingness at a minimum to change existing attitudes by all parties, but I believe it may well finally allow those of us working for software freedom to work together rather than separately.
  2. The extra resources that will likely be brought to bear on the matter will hopefully allow a certified compatible JRE to be ship-able by the variants of Linux that won't tolerate the licensing that is expected in the JCP community - Debian in particular.

Posted by Simon Phipps on May 08, 2005 at 12:43 PM PDT #

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