Harmony vs. Classpath/Kaffe/gcj?

Harmony vs. Classpath/Kaffe/gcj?

Posted May 19, 2006 20:16 UTC (Fri) by robilad (subscriber, #27163)
In reply to: Harmony vs. Classpath/Kaffe/gcj? by stevenj
Parent article: Harmony project to get a Swing/AWT implementation

Not complementary at the source code level, unfortunately.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. ASF's project attracts an audience that cares about using it as a certified as compatible base for open source components from/for their prorietary VMs. That audience (IBM & Intel) does not seem to want to have to deal with having anything GPL-related in it. Any mention of the GPL is apparently a hair raising stimulus in the proprietary Java audience. :)

As Harmony's fast progress so far shows, that audience has some pretty deep pockets, too.

So these days the 'complementary' stands more for the different audiences the projects cater to: FSF to those wanting a free software implementation to run free software, ASF to those wanting to build their proprietary, certified Java(TM) products off an open source implementation.

As an unforeseen side effect, Sun got caught between two fires, and the value proprosition of keeping their code proprietary is going down even faster.

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