05.23
Recently I tried fiddling a bit with OpenOffice.org Base. However I quickly found out that the wizards are broken because Ubuntu’s OOo is compiled with GCJ. Generally this is a good thing, we don’t want to link to a proprietary piece of software by default. The OOo Base wizards are nonetheless broken.
Considering that (Open)Office(.org) is the number one productivity application for businesses, the distribution suppliers (RedHat, Canonical, etc) should be more diligent in their efforts to test and quality assure OOo. How do we expect to be taken seriously by businesses if one or another feature of OpenOffice.org is broken in every single release. The last properly working OpenOffice.org was supplied in Dapper as far as I can remember. This isn’t acceptable!
However, with a OpenJDK in sight, it should soon be possible to dump GCJ and supply Sun’s JDK natively compiled and packaged with Ubuntu, because Sun has been open sourcing large parts of it (almost everything).
