[1] It was announced in early May 2005 and on October 25, 2006, the board of directors voted to make Apache Harmony a top-level project.

[5][6] The Harmony project was initially conceived as an effort to unite all developers of the free Java implementations.

[8] Apache developers would then write the needed classes from scratch and expect necessary large code donations from software companies.

[10] What makes the license unacceptable for ASF is the fact that it imposes rights restrictions through limits on the "field of use" available to users of Harmony, not compliant with the Java Community Process rules.

[4] On November 16, 2011, the Apache Software Foundation board of directors passed a motion to terminate the project.

[28] One director, Larry Rosen, cast a "no" vote, based on the timing rather than the merits of the proposal; it was otherwise unanimous.

The Dynamic Runtime Layer virtual machine consists of the following components: The project provided a portable implementation that ease development on many platforms and operating systems.

Apache Harmony developers integrate several existing, field-tested open-source projects to meet their goal (not reinventing the wheel).

[34] In the Yoko project, used by Harmony,[35] most methods both in the standard declaration[36] and implementing class[37] were undocumented at the end of October 2006.

Harmony, differently, left the central method of the older standard (ORB.connect(Object)) fully unimplemented.

[38] Harmony has seven virtual machine implementations that run Harmony Class Library, all of which were donations by external groups: In the end of November 2006, the language support provided by these virtual machine was still incomplete, and the build instructions recommended to use IBM's proprietary J9 instead to run the class library test suite.