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Java Fallout: OO.o 2.0 and the FOSS Community
Joe Barr writes "Bruce Byfield has an interesting look at the 'fallout' between OpenOffice.org and the free/open source software communities because of their reliance on Java in the latest release. As he says, "It seems a decision based largely on practical considerations -- and with a disregard for the consequences for both the rest of the free and open source software (FOSS) communities and the future of OpenOffice.org itself." This is an issue that is not going away."
The only virus I've ever had infect my Windows computer was Java based, installed due to a flaw in 1.4.2 and some website I visited I suppose. I don't feel any better about Java being integrated in some way that I don't understand with Open Office, than I do with Word using Macro files, or offering VBS integration perhaps.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
John Carmack rips Java a new one here.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Can't these features be ported/compiled with gcj and run as native binaries?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Kinda ironic that Novell's Mono (with root in Microsoft research) is the most promising free VM these days. Too bad Parrot doesn't seem to have java running on it...
I think that this is being blown out of proportion. The integration of java into the latest version of open office, although a little annoying, is not something that is going to keep me from using it on a day to day basis. Especially considering that all of my computers have java installed anyway.
I love to deploy my packages
I think the article makes some interesting points, such as:
Some might argue against Schönheit's characterization of C++ as complex or Java as being not slow. However, technical arguments are in many ways beside the point.
What I got out of it is that the Java environment makes it far easier to add features to the current OO. From the article:
Java allows more rapid development of components for OpenOffice.org, without struggling with the complexity of OpenOffice.org's C++ build environment. People complain about releases not being quick enough and when Java is used to make the build environment less complicated, people bitch about it not being open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
And let's not get started on IDEs...
This has nothing to do with Microsoft and everything to do with Sun, in my opinion. If Sun had the opportunity to be as monopolistic as Microsoft, they would jump at the chance without a second thought.
Simply open sourcing java would be a huge step in the right direction, but they claim they don't want to do that because they are afraid it will fork. In reality, they are simply the kid with the football who doesn't want anyone else to play with it.
the confusion surrounding Java on Windows, thanks to the MS VM supporting only v1.3.
I could be wrong, but I believe that MS's Java support (while it existed) only extended as far as v1.1.3, not v1.3. Of course, that's because they lost the court case to Sun, not because they couldn't or wouldn't support a newer version.
For us Windows devs, no one uses Java anymore
That's because traditionally, with a few notable exceptions, client-side Java apps suck. They're clunky, slow, and they look like arse. That's getting better, but it's almost certainly too little, too late. I do Java development on the server side, and I'm learning C#/.NET in order to do Windows client-side dev work (just scratching an itch). I'm not about to ditch Java, I just believe in using the right tool for the job. Now, it's arguable whether or not C# is the right tool, but experience tells me that Java isn't.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
For us Windows devs, no one uses Java anymore; if you do, it's for support of an existing product. Virtually all new projects are .NET-based or native code.
.NET has meant that a significant number of VB developers have migrated to Java. If you are migrating, it might as well be to something portable!
This may well be true for you, but it is not true in general. A quick search of Job sites shows that there is a considerable amount of new Java development on Windows, even client-side. There is also a lot of J2EE deployment on Windows servers.
The lack of a straightforward migration path from VB6 to
Now I hate Java just as much as the next guy, (well probably moreso, but anyhow...) but I've compiled and used OpenOffice 1.x many times, and let me tell you--Java is not the problem. OpenOffice is *already* enormous and bloated and slow. It also already requires Java just to build the darn thing, or at least it did when I built it. Whether it depends more or less on Java, I don't care as long as it gets at least two of smaller, less bloated, faster...
:)
So, ok, now that we're agreed that we aren't necessarily talking about a technical issue here. Again, what's the problem. That "Java isn't open source"? Well why don't you ask IBM to open up a JVM for you. Or, better yet, write your own! Java is widely used, readily available, and actually pretty darn open as these things go.
So what's the problem. Ideology? Zealotry? Arcane license disputes? Well, it's nothing that'll get in the way of me and my word processor. Just wake me up if it gets larger, more bloated, slower...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Linux already has basically everything you need to build packages that way. The key thing is that Linux already has a way to specify where to find libraries relative to the binary that is trying to load them. Most people who build software for Linux don't know this and stupidly build hard-coded paths into executables and make you change your /etc/ld.so.conf to include
every directory on the planet, but in
reality this is a total waste of time
since $ORIGIN is available and
makes this issue totally go away.
Basically, $ORIGIN works like this: when you build the binary and link against the libraries it need, you can put something like -z origin -rpath '$ORIGIN/../lib' on the ld command line. (Note that the dollar sign is quoted and is intended to go into the executable file unchanged.) This means if the binary in /usr/local/foo/bin/foo
and it wishes to find libfoo.so,
one of the places that the runtime linker
(ld-linux.so) will look when it
tries to load libraries is /usr/local/foo/bin/../lib,
which equates to /usr/local/foo/lib. Presto,
it finds libfoo.so and everyone
is happy, and nobody had to set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH or modify /etc/ld.so.conf.
This means you can, if you want, distributed software that all goes into a directory, and that the directory can be put into any location you wish without any configuration changes needed to run it.
As a matter of fact, even if your goal isn't to distributed a package with all its dependencies bundled in, it still should be the default to use $ORIGIN. If you are building binaries to distribute and your install process require the user to use ldconfig or modify LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you should consider the build broken.
"Although it's true that functionality is important, at what cost?" .net are Java shops. This non issue will not slow down deployment one bit.
Simple. Every and all costs. I program that is not "functional" is useless.
" Corporate adoption may be slowed, as OO.o isn't a completely "free, fully functional" product anymore."
I guess you are right here. I mean so many companies worry about using Java. I mean it is not like java is "free as in beer". Guess what? A huge number of corporations already use Java for internal development. Those that are not tied to VB or
This is yet another religion war that really means next to nothing. It is right up there with the GNU/Linux fight and BSD vs GPL.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And your point is well-taken, but the beef of this argument is with the corporate sector who have serious licensing issues to consider before they even evaluate some alternative application (much less an alternative desktop platform).
For personal users, this is likely a non-issue. For those involved in the creation and maintenance of distributions, or those looking to advise a switch to an alternative corporate office suite, this debate is quite important. It's not a matter of paying up for software that isn't free. It's a matter of how the free software movement should cope with having a flagship application not being completely free.
http://jeffkrimmel.com
Hell, I thought someone had ported Fallout to Java. :(
#19845
They should have used .NET, ironically, since it's much more free than Java is.
.NET is 100% proprietary outside of the meaningless ECMA standards. Is this some sort of troll that completely tricked the moderators?
No freakin' way.
For what it's worth, Sun will be the largest contributor of OSS code in the world this Summer, if they aren't already.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
I've,
Built corporate infrastructure with Java for about ten years now. I've coded probably a million lines of Java in that time frame.
Except because of the most minor of Java changes on Sun's part I've never had to re-write anything.
My Java programs from ten years ago still run just fine.
Sun has many times declared many classes and methods as being obsolete, but they have never turned anything I use off so that I could no longer use it.
So go ahead, complain all you want, but there are people like me out there that are moving forward a lot faster because they use Java, and there are a lot of people moving slower because they cannot get past ideology.
It's fine by me, my children will eat well because of your ineptitude.
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
Read my post if you want to have a feel for how difficult it is to install Sun's JDK on FreeBSD. There are so many twists and turns here that when I reinstalled FreeBSD, I decided to install Kaffe instead to learn Java with (needed for future classes; language use not under my control).
This may be flamebait, but one of the main reasons why I haven't used OpenOffice on my computer is due to these Java dependencies. OpenOffice not only requires Java, but it specifically requires the Sun JDK. Some users may be asking me, "What's the problem?" The problem with that is that there is no binaries for the JDK for FreeBSD 5.x, and that I must agree to a very restrictive license in order to download the sources. Next, I can't compile the sources into a redistributable package (because Sun says so, meaning that for every FreeBSD machine that I have I must compile Java manually, nor give Java packages to others), and I can't even look at the sources without being tainted for life. Finally, the compilation takes an extremely long time to finish.
Don't get me wrong. I like what I've heard about OpenOffice. But as long as OpenOffice is encumbered with Java code that requires the Sun JDK, I'm not using it. How many of you know the BSD story when the BSD developers got tired of AT&T due to its licensing (for those of you who don't know, BSD was originally based on AT&T Unix) and started rewriting the "encumbered" portions of their operating system? It would be great if some developers would do the same with the Java portions in OpenOffice.
To elaborate further, I feel that Sun's handling of Java is a nuisance. Java may be a nice language, but as long as its only really complete implementation of it remains licensed the way that it is, I won't code any open source projects with the Java language, and Java is never going to be a primary open source development language. Why should the code that I write be tied to a non-free, restrictively licensed runtime environment that only runs on the platforms that Sun says that it should run on? Python, Ruby, and even Microsoft's own C# (in the form of Mono) isn't encumbered by such restrictive licensing. Sun's slogan for Java was "write once, run everywhere." Well, it depends on what Sun consists of "everywhere." Since the operating system that I choose to use is considered "nowhere" by Sun, well, I guess that Sun's JDK is going to be "nowhere" near my machines again, and for all of the projects that require this JDK, well, I'm sorry, but I'm not installing them, either.
Gnumeric is a piece of junk. It crashed during the first five minutes after I started trying it out.
Agree about AbiWord, disagree about Gnumeric. Gnumeric is stable does everything I need. I've heard about professors using it to teach spreadsheet classes (instead of Excel) because of it's pretty impressive featureset.
I don't know what distribution and version you're running, but I've built Gnumeric from source many times, and used it on several distributions, and it has always been really stable for me.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Don't be silly; Java's free as in beer, and plenty of places are already using it (or at least asking for it) on the server side. Besides, if they're replacing MS Office, why the hell would they worry that Java is or isn't Free? It's a lot freer than what they have...
Yes, but businesses don't switch platforms based on "it's freer than what I had". Staying with MS Office is cheaper than switching -- which would require retraining of users, tech support, file format issues, and so forth.
I'm not sure I'd switch my business to it. I'd have to shoulder the cost of switching, and then when the transition was done it wouldn't even be entirely open-source.
I'd either stay with MS Office, or switch to something that's really open-source (all the way down) like Abiword+Gnumeric.
Why go to all the trouble of switching to a new set of "open-source" programs if it isn't really open-source? If I'm switching for reason X, I'll make damn sure I get all of the benefits of X.
At all costs. What else is there? Why would anybody develop software, if not to perform a function? The second that other things get in the way of "functionality", is the same second that that software starts to suck. What do you propose is more important than functionality?
Microsoft said the same thing, relegating security and stability, but that's now come back to bite them in the ass.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
It truly is insane... I'm grateful, Sun's license does not allow them to bundle in their own Java in too...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The usual response to anyone who wants anything included in a F/OSS project is "why dont you do it yourself? The developers do it to scratch their itch not yours"
The developers made a design decision for THEIR project. But oh no, thats no good because it's not what the F/OSS community wanted. Lets get this straight - its their project but they shouldnt use the language of their choice because others dont like it?
They're the developers, they decide what they do with it. Who are you to tell them what they should develop their own product in? So it doesnt conform to YOUR philosophy, so what? Sorry but this certainly smacks of zealotry. If you dont like it then fork it and create your own version of OOo.
Practical, pragmatic decisions like using Java are not a problem for Open Source.
Maybe so but the end result is no longer Open because it depends on closed libraries/REs. And OSS must not believe that software developed as open source is technologically superior if they're willing to give up access and control of the source code so easily.
Free Software, on the other hand, has a very precise goal which is to make all software in the system open and free. And there are very real legal and financial reasons they want to accomplish this, aside from the obvious technical advantages of having access to code. The FSF does not think any non-free software is detrimental to the community, but rather insists on calling it what it is, not Free. OpenOffice might not be proprietary and closed source yet, but it is not Free if it requires Sun's JRE to be fully functional. Some components are Free and licensed appropriately for approval by the FSF, but not all. So the community will most likely delete the infringing components and replace them with more open source code and move on. In a sense saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" to Sun.
but it is not a catastrophe for the OO.org team to choose the Open Source route.
No this choice is not a catastrophe. But a competing fork built on pure F/OSS software would be. They would lose more community support and have to work harder to compete. That's a one-two punch from the Free Software community, if it happens. Its like trying to make a profit while your market is shrinking and competition is driving down prices (think AOL).
And, as always, we wish them luck. They're going to need it.
The Qt libraries were free, if not Free, and they made it easier to create an environment and apps that Just Worked. The result was a series of complaints, and when those failed, GNOME. TrollTech noticed that it was losing ground as distros favored Free Software over free software, and finally GPLed Qt.
If OO.o becomes harder and harder to run on GCJ, you're going to see the same thing. Maybe an OO.o fork, maybe a specific effort to create a different Free competitor. But dependence on a non-Free system component is going to create trouble; if OO.o wants to thrive in the long run, it's going to either need to be GCJ-compatible or have Sun open-source Java.
Gnumeric is a piece of junk. It crashed during the first five minutes after I started trying it out.
Gnumeric opens and reads many advanced sheets that OO.o can't handle, especially ones with charts or other advanced componets.
Try it yourself.
So people use Java when releasing applications for multiple platforms. What's the big deal? The JRE costs nothing to companies anyways.
.NET to program if you can't get the windows and controls to work on MONO on linux?? GTK runs on Linux and Windows but no Mac support without installing X11. Installing X11 might be a pain for most Mac users, let alone that adds another step and requirement on the Mac side.
Why use
Why do people dislike Java so much? Is it because it takes to much RAM when using Eclipse to program or NetBeans??? Is it because it's not easy enough for people to program?? What the hell??
Java it's free, IDEs for development are free, it runs on Macs, Linux, BSD, Unix, Windows, etc, etc, etc... My point is... WTF??? It's like we say in spanish "peladito y a la boca" can't be any easier to develop for multpiple platforms having all the tools.
I say people are just ging nuts over peanuts.
Your multiplatform programing are belong to us... get it??
Have a good one.
===== "Every head is a different world so don't invade mine you FREAK!" smartSAGA said
The article makes it sound as though the Java creep is somehow "practical"... it's not. Sun is desperate to get the Java platform into as many places as possible -- it knows very well that it will be a future money-spinner when it triggers all its patents and IP and starts raking in money (it will then own and control the "platform" in much the same way Microsoft does today) -- ever wonder why Sun is *so* loathe to open source Java. All the crap about forking is just nonsense. At the moment, Sun's big competitors like Red Hat refuse to ship Sun's non-free Java. If Sun can force it into Open Office, it could force Red Hat to ship Sun's Java... game over.
OO.o 2.0 is already working on free JVMs. FC4 is shipping this, along with Eclipse, Tomcat, and a ton of other stuff. We've got jonas running as well, just not quite ready to ship.
Yes, but OpenOffice.org isn't aiming for a spot on the server (where Java is entrenched), it's trying to upset MS Office on the desktop, and that's an entirely different situation.
Say what you want, but a large percentage of the folks that are gutsy enough to be rolling out OpenOffice.org are doing so at least in part because they are Free Software advocates. In short, they are pushing OpenOffice.org for ethical reasons, and not for practical reasons. After all, a switch of that magnitude is definitely a risk. Lot's of folks are willing to take a risk on Free Software that they would not be willing to take for "inexpensive" software.
Sun is just being stupid on this front. Java has already fragmented into several mostly compatible forks. IBM has their own JVM, as does Apple, Oracle, Borland, and there are a wide range of Free Software Java-alike systems. Heck, Red Hat and the Debian team are hard at work turning GCJ into a useable (if not completely compatible) system. Already one of the most popular desktop Java applications is IBM's Eclipse, and Eclipse uses the non-pure-Java SWT toolkit instead of Swing.
Sun is losing control of Java, and the best way to reign in the various Java offshoots is to release Sun's JVM under a Free Software license. Freeing Java would completely kill all of the non-Sun Java toolkits, and it would give Sun the Free Software allies it needs to compete against Microsoft's .NET. Heck, right now Mono is doing a better job of enticing Free Software advocates than Sun is.
Java license specifically allows you distribution of the JRE with your products as long as you dont mess with it and it is required to run your program. Gratis.
I think this license also states that you can't distribute a competing Java implementation. Most Linux distributions won't allow themselves to be crippled by that license, so they don't distribute the Sun JVM.
Many people have cried out that everyone should be more practical instead of idealistic on this issue, but the problems people have with OpenOffice relying on Sun's JVM are practical ones. Since distributions can't package a dependency of OpenOffice, they instead have to work around the Java dependencies, and then package it.
The choice of what language the OpenOffice developers use to develop features is completely up to them, but why do you expect people to not be disappointed that there are new features that they cannot use because of the choices they made?
I like the concept of LyX, but the implementation has some serious drawbacks, IMO. I couldn't get it to produce good PDF output, and the widgets are bizarre and don't behave the way I expect.
[...] until recently it seems to me that the (UNIX-centric, remember) FOSS community abhorred the very concept of "word processors." Why would you bother making a dumbed-down, WYSIWYG,...
Scribus is a possible counterexample, although it's really meant as a graphic design and page layout program rather than as a word processor.
when a text editor, markup language (Troff, TeX, DocBook, etc.), and postprocessor is easier [...] and better?
Well, TeX does have some big advantages:
it's free, and not tied to unfree software like Java;
its implementation is of very high quality;
it does a better job of mathematical typesetting than any free or nonfree software in existence;
it has a big, healthy, friendly, helpful user community.
Find free books.
The primary complaint is that SUN insist on heavy handed control of Java, and particularly the JVM, now this is not a problem for Redhat or SuSE who, who have re-distribution rights with SUN, but is inhibative for non-commercial distributions, SUN could solve this, for very little cost, by providing certified freely-re-distributable JVM's for all common architectures (ia32, ia64, 86-64, sparc, ppc, arm ...) tarball + sig; with re-distribution allowed with the SUN computed sig.
Most of this work needs to be done anyway, for good commercial reasons, to sell into the embedded markets.
Miguel, perceptively, realizes that M$ had done something right and if you don't realize it there is a convergence of (interpreted) virtualization technologies perl6 (parrot), JVM (groovy) and CLR (C#), and what this really means is that we will be seening much more of interpreted languages [C#, Java, Lisp, Perl, Python] since they permit a much more effective programming paridgm.
If the hype on these issue went away Java would be much more usable.
There is no Sun JRE for Linux PowerPC, or ARM, or FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD you name it. Distros have switched from XFree86 to X.org for less.
DLLs are binary, and binary compatibility is not forever. Neither are Diamonds BTW.
Are you suggesting that drag and drop programming is a good thing? Maybe it allows for faster implementation but it provides much slower and far more stupid solutions than true programming. I am not even sure that it can be consider true programming.
The problem with tools like that isn't that they aren't really programming. (I agree; they aren't.) It's that people mistake one for the other because for simple projects the results look the same. Because of that, marketroids shamelessly sell low-end, user-targeted tools as equivalent to real code written by professional programmers.
All those companies that went for the easy way out in '97 deserve to suffer the consequences.
True. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of VB apps, Access apps, Perl CGI scripts, and shell scripts that are just fine for the people using them, and always will be.
The problem comes when people try to push tools like that beyond their limits. And no matter how much warning you give that your quick little hack will need to be replaced eventually, people forget that because it *looks* solid. My favorite solution is to make quick hacks look like quick hacks. It's a shame all VB apps don't look like that.
Besides a nicer UI, I have not found anything that VS and Vim does not, while I have found a lot of things Vim does which VS does not. This is Vim, which is simple and lean. If you go for Emacs, it also has a web browser, e-mail and news reader, Eliza and the kitchen sink.
Once you learn the Vim keybindings, it is *much* more productive to use for programming than Visual Studio. Your hands never have to leave the keyboard and there are loads of mnemonics. Just make sure you get a special reinforced Escape key.
The real issues are:
1) There is not a good enough database written in pure C/C++ as there are in Java: HSQL, Apache Derby
2) There is not a good JVM/runtime packages with an opensource license.
So instead of whining OOo uses some non free component to get more market share and please its users, start helping the gcj, classpath and other projects. When RMS did nto have a Free OS he did not turn to 1940 information handling methods, he started making one.
It's not the JVM so much (though the OSS versions are a bit lacking there). It's the class libraries. Java has a very large and functional set of class libraries. If they're not available Java by itself is not terribly interesting. GNU has the GNU Classpath project which has been muddling along for a long time to recreate all of these libraries.
The problem is that SUN can remove all distribution rights after this really catches on
And if they did this I am sure IBM would be more than happy to step in and let their VM be used in its place.
You have a choice of compliant JVMs. This is a good thing.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
For that matter you can download the source off Sun's JDK from their website too. Thats how it get run on BSD.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
G++...
Now, why is there C++ on so many platforms when AT&T, the maker of C++, did not port it to those platforms? Could it possibly be because the OSS community made their own implementation instead of whining to AT&T about opensourcing theirs?
Why should the relationship to Java be any different? Hell, even Mono (the C#/CLR/.Net implementation) is more complete than any of the OSS attempts at making a Java implementation.
Is the OSS community secretly satisfied with the status quo of leaving Java implementations to the industry? (Read: Sun, Apple, IBM, and a few others.)
" 9. Termination for Infringement. Either party may terminate this Agreement immediately should any Software become, or in either party's opinion be likely to become, the subject of a claim of infringement of any intellectual property right."
Worst Case Scenario: Company A owns the rights to JRE. Company B sues company A for some claim of infringement of IP. Company A per JRE license immediately terminates all licenses to JRE to limit their liability. A settles with company B out of court. A offloads the cost of settlement current JRE customers by charging a certain amount for re-downloading the JRE with a current license. Conveniently, terms of the settlement could include passing on the list of registered JRE users to company B, so that B can go after those still violating their IP rights without having downloaded the new 'uninfringing' JRE for a small sum.
Oops. Is it likely? Who knows. Sun has been target of funny lawsuits before (see Kodak). So far they have not passed the costs on to consumers. But if they continue to be under fire by weird IP claims, chances are they will have to do a cost analysis, and cover the settlement costs somehow. The JRE license certainly explictely allows the JRE licensor to terminate the license even before a lawsuit to protect their interests.
cheers, dalibor topic.