OpenOffice 2.0 Criticized on Use of Java

karvind writes "Yahoo is running a story on how OpenOffice 2.0 Faces Opposition over Its Use of Java. According the article: "The problem, according to some free software voices, is that OO.o relies too much on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s proprietary Java programming language in an open-source project. In particular, free software advocates are objecting to the use of Sun specific Java code for such OO.o 2.0 features as the new, Microsoft Access-like database management program, Base and Writer's (OO.o's word processor) document wizards." Linus Torvalds also moved to an open-source solution for software configuration management system."

Covered before

[Quixote]

As I pointed out to the editors (OK, laugh at that), this has been covered before [slashdot.org]. Though, I don't understand the need to throw in Linus's name. Maybe that's to rile up the crowd? :-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How open it is doesn't matter to me...

[AmazingRuss]

...but that abysmal load time makes me willing to pay $130 for MS office. OO loads up like...well...a big fat Java app.

Straining at GNats

[lheal]

Whether OO.o is built using a Free language or just a free language is not important to me. The source code of the suite (in the [Ff]ree language) is available.

Having the source is all I really care about. Would it be better if Sun GPLd Java? Maybe. Would it be better if OO.o were developed using only Free tools? Maybe.

Would any of that change my ability, in the real world, to use Open Office instead of MS Office? Probably not.

Re:If you'll pardon my French

[natrius]

From the article:

The most visible evidence of that is that the FSF (Free Software Foundation) is "is looking for volunteers to maintain a version of OpenOffice that doesn't require a non-free Java platform."

This isn't about having something against Java as a language or being mad at Sun for implementing new features in Java. I think they should use whichever tools allow them to work most efficiently. All this is about is ensuring that all these new features can be utilized without Sun's JVM, since most distros can't ship it. This means people have to provide patches that deal with the incompleteness of the free JVMs. If the patches don't make it upstream, someone still needs to maintain them.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a completely free software stack, and I think there's generally less animosity out there than people are making it seem.

And what would be better?

[ShatteredDream]

Python which is slow, has a much smaller user base and far less consistent and well-documented standard library?

Perl whose readability for many coders is next to nothing?

C++ because we all know that more buffer overflows and random craziness is what OpenOffice needs to compete with Microsoft Office?

C# since 93-95% of the desktop users out there use Windows, why bother with the minority of others? (I actually quite like C# and am hopeful about Mono)

Ruby because a language that most coders have never even seen before is clearly the best way for a fresh start?

Objective-C because when Steve Jobs takes over the world, we'll need to be on his good side?

C, since objects really are overrated for anything that normal developers might want to maintain?

So seriously, of all of the major language choices, which would be better?

OpenOffice just works

[cybrthng]

I dunno about you, but ease of use and functionality is what matters to me.

OpenOffice just works.

I use it for my busiess, at home and for my campaign staff.

I'm not even sure how your points are relevant to the use of StarOffice and the purpose sun is trying to fill with this application.

Sun Java has to go from OOo

[cahiha]

OOo cannot remain dependent on Sun Java: Sun Java just runs on too few systems and configurations. Either OOo gets hacked to remove dependencies on Java altogether, or it needs to be packages with a small, open source Java implementation that works well enough to let OOo function.

Of course, none of this is particularly surprising: Sun is trying to introduce dependencies on their proprietary software in many pieces of software. It's an evil master plan, and it won't work, but that won't stop Schwartz and McNealy from trying until their company is bankrupt.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the WINE project is doing just that - implementing DirectX.

You're right, it's no fun. But it's not quite at the same task level as reimplementing the Java libraries. People have been hacking at them for a number of years, and there's still not complete free replacement.

Re:If you'll pardon my French

[Anonymous Coward]

Code in the com.sun package is generally not reimplementable as it is not documented anywhere. The only way to reimplement it would be to download the existing Sun JVM and copy it. Obviously this is not allowed under the license.

Stuff in the java.* and javax.* packages are publically documented by Sun.

Re:If you'll pardon my French

[mrsbrisby]

If you'll understand why Free Software advocates don't consider it a gift, you'll understand why there's so much hesitation and mistrust.

I believe SUN _truly_ believes as you do: That they're doing the world a favor. That SUN is doing the virtuous thing with SUN JAVA.

However, I would hope that someone at SUN- and others like yourself- would notice that maybe, JUST MAYBE, there's a motivation behind all this mistrust, and a reason why Free Software advocates feel threatened by SUN JAVA.

And while we're making wishes here, maybe they could find out what that reason is, and do something to address it besides cramming their heads through their sphincters and calling people who reason ASSHOLES.

Here's a fantastic reason to avoid SUN's Java: 10 years from now, your program might be worthless. It won't run on modern systems, and you will have the choice of rewriting it from scratch, or performing the effort SUN went through to MAKE Java, just to get your software to work.

Because SUN JAVA isn't Free Software, people who write code for the SUN JAVA PLATFORM are giving an enormous amount of trust to SUN that they will make Java 1.5 (or whatever version they target) run until the end of time. Or at least, until the user of the applications' choosing.

SUN will make a decision (as they always have) that some point exists where SUN JAVA 1.5 will no longer be supported. At that point, if you use an application that runs on SUN JAVA 1.5, you either have to ask your vendor to update it for you, or you're SOL. That vendor might've gone bankrupt, and have no other say in the matter.

Yes, this is indeed an awful lot of trust to be vesting in SUN, so it's no surprise there are a number of people who have worries as to whether or not SUN can be trusted with their OpenOffice documents: I personally enjoy looking at documents I wrote 10 years ago, and I suspect I'll enjoy doing it 10 years from now.

I think at the point SUN is at right now, it might be easier for them to change their behavior so that I can use their software. Surely they want me to use their software, and so I lobby them.

If they don't want me to use their software, then they should say it- like Microsoft has time and again. But if they really want to make Free Software, than we'll keep telling them what they're doing wrong... ... until they do it right.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[David Leppik]

So it seems Stallman has a very good point here. Can you imagine trying to, say, re-implement DirectX if Microsoft suddenly wasn't going to let you code using it? I don't know if this is a comparable task, but it's the only thing I can think of in my terms....

s/DirectX/Visual Basic/
Funny, this isn't as far fetched as it seems.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[m50d]

Replacements are already there, e.g. koffice, but they could do with more developers and users. So we point out the problems with OOo in the hope more people will come and use them and code for them, in the same way the OSS movement as a whole points out the problems with closed source software like windows.

Re:Use of Java

[murdocj]

You can't build Free Software on a non-Free foundation

Of course you can. Stallman himself points out that that's how free software was developed. If the first free software had had to wait for the first free user to toggle the first free monitor and free assembler into memory one byte at a time, there wouldn't be any free software. Free software was built on back of unliberated software.

Re:OpenOffice just works

[Metzli]

Yes and no. To me, functionality includes the ability to run it on multiple platforms. Being able to access the same files on Windows, Linux, and Solaris is a great boon. It's one thing I miss from the old FrameMaker days and it's something I really like now with OO.

Re:Point of order...

[g051051]

The message you quote is from 1 Jul 2002, nearly 3 years ago. Do you have any current indication that com.sun.* classes are still in use?

Re:Stallman's Inconsistent

[Bert64]

There are free bios's (linuxbios for instance) that can boot linux, linux can also boot on systems with other firmware such as sun openfirmware or digital srm..
On the other hand, linux requires HARDWARE to run on, which is also non-free.
The bios is FIRMWARE.. perhaps it has some justification for being non-free seeing as it's integrated into the hardware which will always be non-free. The hardware business is not a scam like the software business, there is ALWAYS a cost for producing hardware, raw materials etc, and hardware usually becomes cheaper once the initial development costs are covered, unlike software.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Software is not a "development approach". Open Source is a "development approach".

Free Software is a philosophy about how a system should exist that is completley free, and available to everyone because it's the right thing to do. Open Source is about getting corporate types to open up thier products so we don't have to pay for them.

Re:Don't like it? Fork it!

[Jason Earl]

Which is precisely what the Free Software Foundation is doing. The FSF people are hoping that the folks at Sun will want to prevent a fork bad enough that they will work at little harder at making OO.org work with gcj. If Sun doesn't play ball then the FSF will fork OO.org and their gcj version will undoubtedly become the version that gets shipped with at least the Debian and Red Hat (and Fedora) distributions (and very probably others as well). And don't think these organizations are bluffing either. Gnome got its start in almost exactly the same way. The FSF, Red Hat, and Debian didn't like the licensing for KDE and so they did something about it.

The real question is whether or not Sun wants a large chunk of its current OO.org's user base to use someone else's fork of OO.org because that's what is currently shaping up to happen. If Sun's execs think that these organizations (especially the FSF) are likely to be "reasonable" about the use of non-free software then they are clearly delusional. Sun has been dealing with GNU software and the FSF forever, and they have never seen them back down once.

The worst part is that Sun really needs the Free Software faction of the Open Source community. After all, it really does take a zealot to propose replacing MS Office with some other piece of software. The pragmatists in the crowd are more than happy to wait and see if MS Office can really be replaced. The people that are currently considering replacing MS Office with OO.org are doing so because they believe in Free Software. Without enough zealots to take that first step OO.org is never going to have serious market penetration.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Mono has about a billion times the liscencing issue then java and classpath put together

2) .net is a toddler, and mono is a baby, while java is a standard in enterprise development (hell, its almost synomous with enterprise development)

3) mono isnt 100% compatible with ms .net, and never will be until ms stops working on it. neither will wine. or classpath. or any reimplementation of a framework of modest size that is under active development.

4) sun has given us a real royalty free liscence, microsoft has given an ecma standard, which means they can charge a (reasonable) fee for it if they wish, and ownership remains in their hands. novell doesnt even offer indemnification for mono.

Anyone using mono for serious projects either has zero forsight, or is a special kind of reckless.

Mostly open is better than mostly closed

[objectwizard42]

Framing java as "not open sourced" misses some significant shades of gray in the software development community. The useful tools for java development have been constructed by a community, and are available for download from sourceforge, apache, sun and other 'vendors'/bazaars.

The useful tools for competing languages are highly proprietary, and the availability of mature, useful communities and code for extending those languages is far more limited than with java.

Criticizing OpenOffice for being built with Java, which isn't "open", is kind of silly, in this broader context. It amounts to cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Anonymous Coward]

What moron gave the parent +5 Insightful? If Microsoft or any Sun competitor buys Sun & Java they won't "slowly tighten the thumb screws" they'll just kill it in a second.

Don't expect an anti-trust suit to achieve anything. By the time the courts have reached a conclusion so many years will have gone by that the final verdict will be irrelevant to the market place. Historically, this has worked in favour of many monopolists (in the USA).

Re:Stallman's Inconsistent

[__aaclcg7560]

Can someone please explain how these two situations are different?

Before there was a demi-god called Stallman, there was the BIOS. Even Stallman had to bow down to a higher authority.

After the BIOS, came a demi-god called Sun, who spoke in the language called Java. But Stallman was jealous of all the attention that Sun got for making Java.

Since Stallman was the creator of GNU/Linux, and didn't drink deeply of Java, he's been pissing on Sun's parade ever since then.

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Jim_Maryland]

While your point is valid, I would argue that you can run OOo on more platforms that MS Office.

This really is the problem. It ties OOo to only the platforms that Sun wants to support.

This link (java.sun.com) [sun.com] has the interesting line "Other vendors provide ports of J2SE to various operating systems and CPUs not listed here.". Does Sun really restrict which platforms Java can run on? My guess is that the platform developer may have to port and test their Java software, but why would you figure Sun to only want to support a limited set of platforms?

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Decaff]

What about platforms where Sun does not provide a JVM? Those people will never be able to tun the full OOo, and the more Java used, the less they will be able to use. Will it eventually be zero?

You simply use a JVM from someone else. Use Apple's VM, or IBM's, or HP's, or BEA's.

Although Sun largely controls Java, it is by no means the only supplier of Java.

Re:And what would be better?

[puregen1us]

Congratulations on the well thought out, objective arguement put forth. A single reason why not to use each language. No positive points considered at all. None of Java's flaws mentioned either.

I actually, have no qualms with using Java, I just prefer to see rational, complete arguements on Slashdot. Something seldom posted.

However, I fail to see the issue with using a proprietary language. The project is open source and will remain that way, and Sun cannot change that. Sun could change Java to spite it, but why would they deliberately harm a free, almost acceptable alternative to a rival's application?

I use Apple's OSX, I don't use BSD's, NeXT's, Apple's OSX, and I don't use GNU Linux, I use Linux. I dislike the standard open-source, free-software bigotry, on licences. I imagine the majority of coders are working to create a decent alternative because they want just that, not out of some need for a jihad against an evil enemy. Why create such a fight. If that effort went into coding the results would be considerably better free software.

Bit of a rant, sorry.

JAVA is a good high level language

[lord_rob the only on]

As it's been already stated in those comments, gcj can run openoffice almost completely. Now, the Apache foundation started a free [apache.org] (as in speech) implementation of j2se 1.5, so sooner or later, I'm sure the integration of JAVA won't be a problem anymore, and people will stop whining Java is not free (I'm one of those whiners, becoming more and more confident).

Re:It's not GPL'ed either!

[Tim C]

I've been writing Java web-apps for nearly 6 years now. In that time, most of them have been deployed to Linux under resin (caucho.com); recently, they've been deployed under WebLogic (a couple of clients asked for it, so they got it, despite not actually needing it).

I've used a variety of different versions of Linux and Windows on my desktop as suited my whim at the time. As you say, that's essentially irrelevant though; my code targets the JVM, not the Windows JVM or the Linux JVM or the Mac OS X JVM, just the JVM.

As it happens, I develop under the Sun JVM, but may well be deploying to that, or IBM's, or BEA's jrockit JVM. As long as it's the correct release, it's immaterial. (And in fact, sometimes I've not even *known* what JVM is being used in production)

Re:Sun NO LONGER controls Java

[jbolden]

AFAIKT the JCP is legally a fully non profit subsidiary of Sun. The money collected goes to Sun. Sun's Process Management Office selects the experts and the specification lead for the Expert Group. That means your comment is essentially like saying, "General Moters doesn't control the engine specification Buick does". This may be true but ultimately Buick doesn't exist in any legal sense.

Regardless of this however , of the 14 Expert Groups that have been formed, eight are led by Sun employees. Which means Sun controls Java in practice. Now of course the same can be send for Open Office (which is basically a Sun product) so I'm not sure what to say about the original complaint.

Re:If you'll pardon my French

[Anonymous Coward]

If you make a gift of pork to someone whose beliefs say "don't eat pork," should they thank you and chow down?

If pork is what you've got, yes, they should thank you even if they decide not to eat. And if they starve, they shouldn't try to make you look like a moral inferior for only having pork to offer.

Re:And what would be better?

[the eric conspiracy]

You don't have to bother writing things like getFoo() and setFoo() most of the time.

How is total lack of data hiding in an OO language an advantage?

Re:OpenOffice just works

[Fred_A]

Creating "office" documents is rarely the sole thing you do in a job.

For example I create a lot of them to document what I've done on various machines on various networks so that my customers know what has been going on. However all my logs, all my tools, everything lives on my linux partition, not on the smallish Windows one that only has a couple games on it (SWAT4 and Brothers in Arms currently).

Rebooting every 15 minutes while writing a document just to check something isn't practical. Having a dedicated machine just for office work when it really is a subset of what I do would be silly (although other machines here serve various other purposes).

So even when MS Office was better than what was available in Unix, I *still* used Unix based office suites (ApplixWare at the time, LaTeX and whatever that 123 curses based clone was, before that).

However I don't mind rebooting in XP every now and then to spend a couple hour in a game.

No ideology involved. Just don't think everyone works the same way you do.