Apache Harmony is an implementation of J2SE 5 under the Apache License v2, and is currently under incubation at Apache. Project founder of Apache Harmony, Dalibor Topic, in a recent interview says that “I would expect Apache Harmony to become useful in the next three to five years…”

In his interview published on LinuxPlanet, he goes on to say that “We’ve now got several full free software J2EE stacks that run on top of free software support libraries, and on free software operating systems. There is only one remaining proprietary wedge in those stacks, and that’s the Java implementation.”

Open Source Java has been a widely debated subject and James Gosling had even warned that allowing multiple implementations of Java technologies could yield the incompatibilities that happened with Unix and are happening again with Linux distributions.

After the initial bang, Apache Harmony has been away from the spotlight for the past year or so. Considering the rate at which Java and the software development world moves, one wonders how useful would an Apache implementation of J2SE 1.5 be, if it’s final release happens in 2010.

Related:
>> Is OpenSource volunteer based or employee based?
>> JavaOne 2005 could be dominated by discussions about the planned Apache JSDK (Harmony)
>> Just Another Java Open Source Story (JAJOSS)
>> Total cost of ownership (TCO): Commercial vs Open source software
>> Open-Source keeps me ‘coding fit’

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