OOo is still free; it just has a lot of Java depends…

So 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.

4 Comments

  1. Richard Holt says:

    Hey Colin,
    Great job! I tend to ignore Java. Still running 1.4.2 on OOo114 and m65 seems OK. I don’t worry too much about Java. Java is too slow in most peoples minds to really get excited about. Maybe I’m wrong, but everything Java I’ve used has made me believe it.

    saludos,
    Richard.

  2. smerdy says:

    If this is an issue bundle and run Abiword

  3. […] 2.3.1, available on the porting site, will not allow you to run Base, or anything that requires Java. At least the message in red, tells all: Please note that the Java features of OpenOffice.org are […]

  4. smerdy says:

    If this is an issue bundle and run Abiword


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