Will Apache Harmony succeed?

There was a survey [1] two and half years ago when Apache Harmony was started, to get people's comments on Apache Harmony's fate. Reading through it, I felt more pessimistic or negative opinions than optimistic or positive ones. Many people believed Harmony was either useless or going to fail, although they had different reasons.

About nine months ago, an article "How To Tell The Open-Source Winners From The Losers" [2] tried to summarize why an open source project could fail. Those are nine points to check:

1. A thriving community: A handful of lead developers, a large body of contributors, and a substantial--or at least motivated--user group offering ideas.
   
2. Disruptive goals: Does something notably better than commercial code. Free isn't enough.
   
3. A benevolent dictator: Leader who can inspire and guide developers, asking the right questions and letting only the right code in.
   
4. Transparency: Decisions are made openly, with threads of discussion, active mailing list, and negative and positive comments aired.
   
5. Civility: Strong forums police against personal attacks or niggling issues, focus on big goals.
   
6. Documentation: What good's a project that can't be implemented by those outside its development?
   
7. Employed developers: The key developers need to work on it full time.
   
8. A clear license: Some are very business friendly, others clear as mud.
   
9. Commercial support: Companies need more than e-mail support from volunteers. Is there a solid company employing people you can call?

Using this checklist to measure Harmony, though Harmony has good scores for most of the points, Charles doubted "what passionate user community will form around Harmony when open Java is available on the Net?"

I have to say Charles has made very valid points largely for open source projects, but I can't agree that Harmony is losing developers due to OpenJDK. I won't elaborate my arguments, just one point here: Harmony is not necessarily existing only as an alternative Java implementation. So Harmony is not necessarily losing its developers, because they are not just looking for an alternative Java implementation. For this specific point, I have a couple of examples:

• Google Android uses Apache Harmony for its class libraries;
  
• People are porting Harmony GC(s) to other runtime systems;
  
• Some Java applications do not care if Harmony is Java certified, using Harmony as default runtime environment.

Let's see how Apache Harmony is going to evolve. It's still too young (less than three years old). Stay tuned.

[1] http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t18646.html
[2] http://www.crn.com/article/printableArticle.jhtml?articleId=197003131