Comment 6 for bug 199437

I agree with Gert that this is an issue for upstream. But anyhow, as we are already discussing it, here are my conclusions after reading some stuff there, specifically,

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=discuss&by=thread&from=120242
http://ui.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9304

Instead of a wrapper around native widget toolkits for each platform, they wrap around calls to lower-level drawing routines (this is called VCL). I'm not sure I fully grasp why they see this as better. It seems that the main advantage is that to add a new platform one needs to only wrap a few low-level drawing routines, instead of a large number of widget-level stuff. This seems peculiar since there are only say 5 main environments to support. But perhaps they are concerned about new platforms appearing.