JamVM : road to nowhere?

Change logs and development notes never give any insight into the wider whys and wherefores of a project. Perhaps that's for the better; stick to the facts, that's what engineers are good at. But as this is my first real post on JamVM (now that I know everything is working) I think it's appropriate.

I started JamVM because I stopped being paid to work on proprietary VMs (after leaving a suitable gap). Because of worries of tainting I started my own VM rather than helping out on another. For the same reason I never directly contributed to GNU Classpath either. Of course, I wanted to make it smaller than any other, and I also wanted to make it open-source.

I work on JamVM because I enjoy it. It's also nice to get the (occasional) positive email from users, and to see people using it on a whole variety of hardware. The download statistics are also still going up (last month downloads from sourceforge was over 1000 for the first time, and this doesn't include all the distros that package it and embedded buildroots).

The problem is I sometimes wonder whether I'm flogging a dead horse and I'd be better off contributing my time to something else. I'm not trying to throw my toys out of the pram either; this is a serious and legitimate question.

Of course, the reason is OpenJDK and to a lesser extent PhoneME. Java is now open-sourced, mostly unencumbered and finally packaged. At best am I wasting my time, and at worst am I fragmenting and confusing things? Opinions, dear readers, gratefully received.

I discussed this with Jeroen Frijters at FOSDEM. In danger of misrepresenting things due to alcohol abuse, the general upshot was "why care?". If you still enjoy doing it, then do it. So I am.

Syndicated 2008-04-25 16:29:00 (Updated 2008-04-25 17:40:06) from Robert Lougher