OOo is still free; it just has a lot of Java depends…
Tuesday, December 21st, 2004So reading the OpenOffice.org 2.0 preview review, Hubert thinks OOo 2.0 is non-free now. Well, its always been the case then…. for both building and the app itself
- Accessibility features need Sun’s JDK 1.4.1 with the ATK layer
- XML file filters as well as XSLT filters, including that for Docbook
- JDBC database connectivity
- Report Wizard
- PocketExcel/Word import features
- Java UNO bridge
- The SDK itself has Java depends - on OS X, we point to Java as well as Ant in configure
- Rhino for scripting
- Applet access when doing HTML stuff (or embedding in Impress for instance)
- And now… HSQLDB for database integration
On the bright side, this is all disabled in the ooo-build that most Linux distros tend to use, so OOo 2.0 is generally free, as opposed to being non-free. And with work done to get OOo building using gcj, I wouldn’t worry so much about OOo 2.0 being non-free. Join Caolan and the rest of the free-JDK people at jdk@tools.openoffice.org.