22 May 2005
Where is the Harmony?
Things like the bad competition between KDE and GNOME is what keeps me interested in the harmony project. There is also good competition between these projects. And I do hope Harmony can be what freedesktop.org is for the larger free software desktop community. That is what we have always tried to do with GNU Classpath.
And it seems that is kind of happening now. We have even seen Apache hackers contributing patches to Kaffe (showing that the licensing issue can be overcome!). And there is a lot of talk on the list on the cutting edge research that is being done against all the free runtimes (Robert surprized me by posting about an university course on hacking JamVM).
And even gadek and I seem to agree for a change. He points out Snap which tries to show that what Harmony set out to be is already possible. Creating a collection of free libraries, runtimes, compilers, tools and applications to show what the community around GNU Classpath has produced these last few years. Hopefully people wanting to make Harmony a success check out these kind of collections and try out Kaffe OpenVM or GCC 4.0 to see how we can have harmony asap! (BTW. The Live-CD idea is really nice. I wish there was one for FC4test3 to show all the native stuff created with GCJ for those that don’t want to install a full FC4 test release.)