Harmonising Java
Four days after the announcement of the long awaited and hoped-for proposal to create an Open Source Java for the Apache Foundation, fielded by Jakarta Project Chair Geir Magnusson Jr., IBM acquired Magnusson’s employer Gluecode, in a move that is sure to stir a new round of speculation about IBM’s intentions towards Java.
Opinions about the Harmony proposal among execs and pundits vary, but developers will almost certainly consider it a Good Thing.
If accepted, Harmony will become a “Podling“, under the care of the Apache Incubator PMC. Magnusson was also involved in mentoring the recently incubated Apache Geronimo J2EE server project, and is currently the mentor of the Agila lightweight Business Process Management engine, donated by Gluecode to the Apache Foundation. IBM’s earlier major move in conjunction with Java was in August 2004, when the company donated 500.000 lines of code from it’s proprietary Cloudscape relational database to the Apache Derby project, which is still in incubation. As part of it’s acquisition of Gluecode, IBM pledged “a major commitment to Apache Geronimo as the Open Source application server of the future”, to be backed up with the offer of contributors and code to the project’s community.
Interestingly, the Harmony FAQ hints at IBM offering SWT to the project, leading one to wonder whether these developments were orchestrated; certainly, this would be a huge boon to an Open Source implementation of Java, as SWT is steadily gaining converts from Swing, but also from other native UI toolkits, and is already on offer under an Open Source license. As for licensing the new J2SE with the Sun TCK, the FAQ mentions that Apache will apply to Sun for a scholarship as a qualified non-profit (Apache-SSL author Ben Laurie and concurrency guru Doug Lea are currently on the review board), but I suspect IBM will also be on hand to offer assistance should it be required.
Although pressure on Sun to opensource Java will probably be lessened now, it will be interesting to see how the company reacts to the mounting wave of good karma IBM and Apache are amassing on enterprise Open Source Java. Sun’s president recently criticised the GPL as an instrument of American economic imperialism, but relations between Sun and the Apache Foundation have mostly been cordial, and no such accusations have been levelled against the Apache Software License.
Update (20:37): As expected, Slashdot is bristling with speculation. It’s sort of a connect-the-dots game, but some interesting tidbits surface from time to time (eg. 1, 2, 3, 4).
Update (16/3): Sun’s Tim Bray, Simon Phipps and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing, as Slashdot dupe (duplicate news item) notes. Magnusson: “Apache Harmony has nothing to do with Gluecode. Gluecode focuses on Java application servers. It has nothing to do with J2SE implementations, and has no interest in J2SE implementations.”
