It sounds like people involved with the project are happy with the user community and the process being followed by the Derby committers, and it's great they've added a committer since starting Incubation.
However, the committer diversity issue has been raised as an issue by at least a couple folks. While it looks like they meet the requirement to have committers from at least three independent organizations (I believe Noel and Jeremy are the two who are independent from IBM), the other question that has been asked of projects requesting graduation is:
If a single vendor/individual was to drop their contribution for some reason, is there sufficient independent community to continue the project?
I am absolutely certain that if any single person was to leave right now then there would be little impact (although they would be missed :-)
I believe that if IBM were to re-allocate resources but allow people to work on their own time then there would be some impact but things would continue. There is enough enthusiasm in the community that I believe people work on this because they want to not just because it's a job.
If IBM were to stop their people working on it all together (and if they are able to) then it would be very disruptive given most of the technical internal knowledge and history is in the people. With the size of the codebase and the complexity of the technology that situation is going to remain for quite some time. Given the ongoing support by IBM, both in people and in technical resources (e.g. test suites, the network driver, and such), there is no indication at all that this will happen; in fact quite the opposite.
In short, I believe there is enough independent community around the project already that it will continue, combined with a stated objective to grow that community as fast as practical.
-- Jeremy
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