[clug] Why isn't Java popular on the Linux Desktop?

[Francis James Whittle]

On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 12:55 +1000, Francis Markham wrote:
> Actually, OpenOffice.org isn't a good datapoint for this.
> OpenOffice.Org is based on the StarOffice code-base.  The integrated
> StarOffice suite, written in C++, was created in 1994 when Java was
> still called Oak and not publicly available.  Sun purchased StarOffice
> in 1999, apparently because it was cheaper for them to purchase the
> rights to StarOffice and its developers than it was to license MS
> Office for internal use at Sun.  In any case, much of the C++ code
> base was open sourced and became OO.org, and has seemingly remained a
> relatively low priority for Sun ever since.  Re-writing the whole
> office suite in Java would be a monumental waste of already scarce
> resources.

Okay I wasn't certain on the early early day, but knew about the
StarOffice code base (I used to use StarOffice 5 on Solaris).

I don't, however, see how re-writing the whole office suite in three
different toolkits across multiple platforms with a completely different
file format and extension structure is any less a waste of already scare
resources than rewriting it for the same in Java where most of the hard
work was already done or being done unless they thought Java wasn't up
to the task.  Substantial parts of OpenOffice.org and especially those
parts that deal with platform differences were re-written anyway.