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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.