Harmony's a great idea.

Harmony is a great, great, great idea. At first I thought, "What a ridiculous idea!" and then I realised what a generous bunch of people were involved. They are finally doing something to slow down the Jakarta juggernaut.

Just think: this is going to suck up so much time on the part of the committers that Geronimo will be derailed. This will abort a ton of new commons-* releases. The open-sourceness of it will be a black hole attracting hundreds of requirements-hating open-source fanatics - oddly enough, into a black hole with very strict requirements, since it ain't a JVM if it can't pass the JVM test kit.

This could be an attractor that stabilizes Java's open source community, by giving coders a sandbox to play in and litter about in.

Like I said, at first I was horrified. Then I passed through the stages of emotion: from horror to grief, from grief to acceptance, from acceptance to humour, from humour to realization that it might not be such a bad thing after all.

The odd thing: it's not really necessary. I have yet to see where there's an actual need that would be fulfilled by this - outside of the "suck up all available resources and then some more" aspect I've already mentioned - but I'm all for them doing it.

Of course, I'll be watching it, because it's natural to watch car wrecks.

Good luck, guys. You're going to need it. Don't let the JRL, JDL, JIUL stop you or anything.