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Java Developer Says He Built, Launched Basic Open Source Office Suite In 30 Days
alphadogg writes "A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes. Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said. The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses many popular open source Java libraries. That allowed him to built the program in 30 days, he said, a process that he documented daily on YouTube (video). The suite was released as an alpha version, which means that not everything works yet. Goubard's Amsterdam company, Japplis, launched the suite, which is available under an Apache 2.0 license. This license allows companies to change and redistribute the code internally without having to share the new code publicly, he said."
I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company (150k+ employees) and there is a blank ban on touching any GPL code ever for internal development.
Internal redistribution or not, there is always a chance that you may want to give some variation of the software to client/subsidiary company/whatever - and opening source at this moment (which might be linked to some in-house prioprietary libraries in meantime) is just not worth the effort.
If you'd actually listen to those warnings, you'd realise they're against Java browser plugin, not JRE or Java itself.
Not true. We use NetBeans almost exclusively (I am one of them).