Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FSF, OpenOffice.org Team Reach Agreement on Java

Posted by timothy on from the detente dept.

Bruce Byfield points out his NewsForge (part of OSTG) article about something good coming out of the conflict over Java in OpenOffice.org. It begins "A dispute between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and OpenOffice.org (OOo) over the increased use of Java in the upcoming version 2.0 release of OOo is over -- at least for now. The two groups have found a short-term solution, and are working together on ways to keep the dispute from happening again." The story provides a decent background on why it matters, and shows a surprisingly conciliatory attitude on both sides.

1 of 411 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Will this always happen. by sbrown123 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Java API *is* well documented. The problem with the extensions is that the open source JVMs (GCJ in particular) did not handle them correctly. This is not a big deal. Someone should report the bugs with GCJ to the project's bugzilla -or- help fix GCJ to get it to work. This was the result of the conflict anyways:

    The FSF, Stallman explained, did not have a preference for other programming languages over Java. It simply wanted assurance that any Java code would be compatible with free implementations of Java. After discussion options with Carr, he suggested that the Free Software Foundation would concentrate on expanding the GCJ efforts

    Yep. Conflict solved. OO.o can stay free of Sun's JVM if it wishes and GCJ gets some bugs exorcised. Everyone wins.