F8 and Staroffice8

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 15:00 +0000, Simon Andrews wrote:
> Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> > I think the appropriate thing to do is to temporarily roll the X libs in
> > question in F8 back to the F7 versions (or their equivalents) until the
> > X and Java guys work out their own differences.
> 
> With the best will in the world this isn't going to happen, and 
> personally I don't think it should.
> 
> Fedora includes IcedTea which is to all intents and purposes the Sun JRE 
> (v1.7).  It's been compiled to work with the X libs on F8 and works just 
> fine.
<snip...>

With all due respect, I strongly disagree. This is an idealistic
position that doesn't fix the practical problem. Having Iced Tea
included doesn't help the problem people are having. Period. Suggesting
someone to roll back to F7 also isn't practical. Suggesting (as someone
else did) that you use the appropriate set of libs from the F7 distro is
a little more realistic, but you didn't go there...

Understand that you have taken a position that, because a person has a
needed application which, by all rights, _should_ run but doesn't
bacause of a disagreement that they have no say in, you're telling them
that they should use the previous and, by implication, less featured
version of Fedora. Ever walked into a store and, based on your personal
appearance, had someone greet you by saying, "let me show you something
a little less expensive..."? Your suggestion leaves excactly the same
feeling with someone. So much for being inclusive.

In today's world, you will always have a mix of free and proprietary
software to address complete business needs. Commercial vendors aren't
going to react as quickly - for many and various reasons ranging from
the practical and economic to those that make no sense to anyone.

The X and Java guys don't seem likely to work out their differences
anytime soon, and even if they did, the commercial vendors relying on
these packages aren't likely to change their ways anytime soon either.

I have found that the key to gaining acceptance is making appropriate
trade-offs and taking practical, measured, acceptable risks, instead of
holding to an impractical standard of idealism. It's possible to do that
without compromising on core values. It's mandatory to do that to
succeed in business.

> PS Hopefully the inclusion of a free JRE in the core distribution will 
> put an end to the inclusion of a program specific JRE alongside java 
> programs in linux.  That always seemed a really hacky way to make your 
> programs work.

It may be hacky, but it still is reality. Taking this type of position
does more to hurt Fedora in terms of acceptance than help. Commercial
vendors - as well as a number of OpenSource vendors - will continue to
include JREs with their software for the foreseeable future because not
every OS includes an open JRE. Some may never for reasons of economics,
busines model, and even "software religion".

Some like OpenOffice will at least provide a choice. But I wouldn't hold
my breath untill a freely distributable JRE with consistent,
standardized, and cooperative APIs everyone agrees to comes along. Even
then you would need it to be all but guaranteed to be included across
all of the most popular Linux distros, Mac OS, and Windows. Without
that, commercial and several OpenSource vendors will always include
their own JRE with their apps.

I'll bet good money that F8 will have long since seen its EOL before
that happens...

--
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In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is.

--Yogi Berra