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Of course, being OSS, if they don't work together, it's easy enough to take the attitude of "may the best fork win" from the sidelines. It may be just as well to have a choice. I agree that it might be better to have a version that's Mac-centric. I prefer Camino to Firefox, for example. I'm also rooting for the NeoOffice team because they took the initiative of working on an Aqua port back when OOo just didn't seem interested. Still... I'd be glad to see OOo support OSX themselves, even if I stuck with NeoOffice.

Mind you i would love to be able to start neo office without automagically loading a document and then selecting what you want from the menu bar.

I haven't gotten very far into playing with these things, but maybe you can find some helphere.

Much more attractive than what, vanilla OpenOffice? That's not saying much. Any Mac user will tell you NeoOffice still looks like shit, and more importantly, behaves in ways that contravene a Mac user's expectations of elegance and consistency.

If the developers are strapped for cash and need "donations" they should just ask for them instead of charging for their "free software".

They are. In exchange, they'll give you early access to a compiled and packaged binary.

We are perfectly capable of being grateful for their contribution while simultaneously censuring them for their moral failures.

Bullcrap. These guys are not violating the letter of the GPL in any way. If you want the alpha and can't wait 3 weeks, go to CVS and build it yourself. They are charging for a service, namely early access to the build. Read the FAQ for more.

If you follow development of this project at ALL, you'd have learned how this was the ONLY way that development could continue. It is not a get-rich scheme, but a volunteer solution to keep the two developers from having to abandon the project entirely.

Again, if you can't wait the four weeks during the early access program and unwilling to pay the twenty bucks or so, then just build the binary yourself.

Oh, and if you personally aren't rebranding the software and making it available as a free download for others (got the bandwidth?), well, it seems you're a bit of a hypocrite.

I take your censure and raise it by three moral outrages.

Three little letters: G. P. L. NeoOffice is 95% OpenOffice.org. Why should I have to pay to be a bug-tester on an open source (read GPL'd) project? Bittorrenting the builds would not be piracy, it would be 100% legal under the GPL. The NeoOffice guys have no right to control the distribution of GPL'd code, duh.

You're right, except...

* NeoOffice is GPL'd, but not because of OpenOffice.org. OO.o is released under the LGPL, not the GPL. NeoOffice, on the other hand, is fully GPLd.

* As long as you are passing along the source (when requested), you can sell and/or give away GPL'd software. But you may not, according to NeoOffice's trademark rules, market NeoOffice under the NeoOffice brand. You must strip out all references to NeoOffice and any logos/graphics that have been trademarked. The exceptions to this are laid out in NO's wiki.

* Evey DURING the pay-for-the-alpha "early access" period (which only lasts a couple of weeks) anyone can download and compile from CVS themselves, no problem.

The Early Access FAQ, as it lays this stuff out pretty clearly.

Three little letters: G. P. L. NeoOffice is 95% OpenOffice.org. Why should I have to pay to be a bug-tester on an open source (read GPL'd) project? Bittorrenting the builds would not be piracy, it would be 100% legal under the GPL. The NeoOffice guys have no right to control the distribution of GPL'd code, duh.

You're right, except...

* NeoOffice is GPL'd, but not because of OpenOffice.org. OO.o is released under the LGPL, not the GPL. NeoOffice, on the other hand, is fully GPLd.

* As long as you are passing along the source (when requested), you can sell and/or give away GPL'd software. But you may not, according to NeoOffice's trademark rules, market NeoOffice under the NeoOffice brand. You must strip out all references to NeoOffice and any logos/graphics that have been trademarked. The exceptions to this are laid out in NO's wiki.

* Evey DURING the pay-for-the-alpha "early access" period (which only lasts a couple of weeks) anyone can download and compile from CVS themselves, no problem.

The Early Access FAQ, as it lays this stuff out pretty clearly.

I don't like having my F/OSS software held hostage... I'm using the ACTUALLY FREE X11 build of OOo on my Intel mac, and it works great. There's no reason to use NeoOffice, really, or pay their ransom to have it work on your Intel Mac.

Don't be a prick. They only have two developers and need to raise funds so they can continue to afford to develop. They charge a very nominal amount for ALPHA versions, and only for a short period (like 3-4 weeks). After the testing phase, they no longer charge anything.

So quit your whining. This is the only way Neooffice could feasibly continue as a project. And by the way, if you'd rather run X11, that's great. But not having to use X11 is only one of many reasons NO is better. For more, check out their wiki.

One last thing-- although they charge their fee to participate in the alpha testing for a short while, you can always compile your own binary from CVS and it won't cost anything.

I don't think Microsoft would tolerate Apple moving to OpenDocument; OS X must be really pissing Ballmer off as it is, not because of the numbers sold, but because it rubs in just how late Vista is -- and that you can just buy OS X 10.4 "Tiger" right now if you want Vista's oh-so-cool features. Apple would not survive a frontal attack by Microsoft. Don't look for help there.

However:

The Mac-specific port of OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J is very good indeed, though not fully aquafied (yet). What is more, it is GPL. The "Tiger" live search system spotlight doesn't support OpenDocument out of the bo- er, off the website, but the NeoOffice/J people provide a nice plugin called NeoLight that does the trick. I can recommend NeoOffice/J wholeheartedly. It is a bit slow on my iBook 800MHz G4 with 640 MByte RAM, but then most things are, and it hasn't crashed once.

IMHO, NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org are Apple's best long-term hope to get out from Microsoft's thumb. I am disappointed that Apple is not doing more to support their work, but then again, I'm sure Microsoft has somebody sitting in the MS Office for Mac department making sure Apple doesn't do anything to hurt their cash cow. The price tag on the full standard retail version of MS Office if you are not a student is $399, after all. Where would Microsoft be if people used OpenOffice and did something else with that money?

So...is NeoOffice/J written in Java?

No.

NeoOffice/J is a Mac OS X native version of OpenOffice.org that uses small amounts of Java code for graphics drawing and configuration.

OpenOffice.org is written primarily in platform-agnostic C++. However, NeoOffice/J takes advantage of Mac OS X's advanced Java integration to tap into the OS X look-and-feel. In other words, the "J" in NeoOffice/J primarily has to do with operations that affect how the application appears to the user. The "guts" of the office suite are written in C++. (The code that makes up NeoOffice/J is 99% OpenOffice.org code shared among all OpenOffice.org platforms and 1% Mac OS X-specific code in Java, C++, C, and Objective-C.)

Thus NeoOffice/J will only run on Macintosh computers running Mac OS X 10.2.x, 10.3.x or 10.4.x--not on Mac OS 9, Windows, Linux, Darwin, or any other form of UNIX.

Five years refers to the period of time since the first Mac OOo code was written. OOo on the Mac didn't even launch until 2002 and OOo 1.0.3 on the Mac wasn't released until 2003. Neo/J has really only been in development for two years, mainly by one programmer in his spare time.

http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/History_ of_NeoOffice_and_OpenOffice.org:_Introduction (when the wiki comes back again)

i think neooffice/j does include support for unicode text: http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/NeoOffic e/J_Feature_Comparison/ and abi word isn't ready yet. i like their UI better, but it slaughters ms word files when you open them. my 2 cents

I can't think of a better place, except perhaps the two developers of NeoOffice/J, one of whom is now having to take a break from development due to economic concerns...

If you install XCode 2.0 (free with OSX 10.4) it contains template project code to create your own metadata importers. The OpenOffice people would need to create an importer and stick it in /Library/Spotlight. It's a fairly trivial task.

Try NeoLight.

W

I looked it up (QT screenshot, QT/Aqua screenshot).

It looks impressive, compared to Neooffice/J.

But does that QT OOo actually build? on the Mac?

NeoOffice/J, the current version, is Java based (from the wiki. I'd like to see a version of OpenOffice using native Aqua and Quartz.

With more information here.

Answers a lot of questions people are posting here, especially about the difference between the stable Neooffice/J and the older, experimental NeoOffice/C (Btw-- the C stands for "Cocoa" not the programming language C).

W