“Harmony, an open source Java implementation, is currently in
incubator status at the Apache Software Foundation. The Harmony
project mission is to create a compatible, independent
implementation of J2SE 5 under the Apache License v2, and ‘create a
community-developed modular runtime (VM and class library)
architecture to allow independent implementations to share runtime
components, and allow independent innovation in runtime
components.’“There is a lot of open source activity currently surrounding
Java, from JBoss and Geronimo (open source application servers) to
MyFaces and Spring (open source web application frameworks), but
Java itself is the last proprietary piece of the puzzle. If Harmony
is successful, will Sun still matter?“I asked Dalibor Topic, one of the project founders, to tell us
more about the history of the project, its importance to the Java
community, and plans for the future…”