Re: [ossig] Rising Controversy in OpenOffice + Java Issue

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 13:38 +0800, Uwe Dippel wrote:
> > Read the article here:
> > http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/03/22/204244.shtml?tid=93
> 
> Oh, was waiting for someone to bring it up. Might be 'our' earth quake'.
> Am quite frustrated and disappointed; such a loss; whatever happens. SUN 
> - as much as I adore them - knows how to screw up. One day they'll fall.

Thats why we won't use Sun stuff. Run Fedora Core 4 test1, and notice
that the OOo beta release there has all the features fully running
thanks to GCJ

> My worries are not about that database being in JAVA. That's fine. 
> Whatever they like and have available. But they introduce Java into the 
> 'skeleton' of OpenOffice, unnecessarily. Like for wizards and templates 
> *and reduce the normal functionalities if you don't use JAVA*.
> So what we'll see, I guess, will be a fork. Re-inventing the wheel.
> Stupid stupid SUN. Instead of opensourcing JAVA with this, they close 
> OpenOffice features to non-JAVA.

Report wizards, and a few other things are dependent on Java:

http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2004/12/21/ooo-is-still-free-it-
just-has-a-lot-of-java-depends

Alas the beauty is that if you use a reasonably sane/modern
distribution, you don't need Java from Sun for all functionality. In
fact, with lots of work being done, it seems to "just work" with gcj/gij

fedora-devel-java-list@redhat.com's archives might interest some folk as
well...

> Yes, I won't work for a fork, but I'll use one, without JAVA. And not 
> because I hated JAVA, like it, and not because it is said to be slow.
> Simply because of not wanting to be locked in to a vendor (SUN) and 
> their twists and turns.

Its really not that slow, anymore. Well, comparatively slow, but I've
been using quite a number of Java dependent features recently and am not
finding it a big issue

In fact, NeoOffice/J for OS X is a GPL-based OOo fork thats got about 3%
different codebase, with a Java interface (aquafied)

> Very very sad,

Hope you continue using it. There are other bindings that you can use
with core functionality, incidentally - Python, my favourite, is one of
them
-- 
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, 
then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi


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