I’ve been watching the Harmony development list since just after it’s inception and it’s been very interesting reading when you look at the big picture.  I’ve skipped over most of the technical discussions and focussed more on the interpersonal and inter-organizational topics as well as legal issues etc.

What is clear from watching the posts flow through is that there are a whole lot of people from outside of of Apache getting involved.  There’s also a bunch of people that appear to be completely new to open source as well.  Most of these people will rapidly drop off when they realize they can’t keep up with the amount of email passing through the list, let alone the actual work involved when that really gets started.

Despite that though it’s clear that the project is building a lot of bridges already.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of concerns from all sides and various other problems but it’s clear that there is intent from all sides to resolve the issues and work together.  That’s a big thing.  There is far too much distrust and separation in the open source world and it’s severely limiting not only the public perception of the open source movement but also the actual quality of the code produced.  There are a number of things that are helping to resolve differences but Harmony is a key one and not only within the open source community but also in the overlapping Java community.

If no code is ever written the Harmony project will be a success if it can help build bridges and combine the good work of a wide range of projects, both in Harmony itself and also completely unrelated projects that benefit from the work for Harmony of resolving licensing differences.  That’s a good thing and that’s why I’m watching on intently.