[bkor]

Michael Meeks once said they want to get rid of as much of Java as possible. Not sure of all the reasons. Just having Java enabled in OO.org used to be a major cause of OO.org starting up slowly. I haven't checked if that is still the case in LibreOffice, but not needing Java is quite nice. IIRC the Java dependency was not really made on technical reasons, more that either the developers (Sun) knew+liked it or that they wanted to push it.

I really appreciate that they're reducing the amount of languages in the project, makes it easier for new developers to join. There are loads of things that they're doing just to make it easier for developers. Pretty weird reason to prefer LibreOffice because of this, but that's me :P