Microsoft Office On OSX, *BSD, *nix?

aliya writes: "Microsoft has announced Office and IE5.5 for Mac OS X in mid-2001. Given that OS X is based on BSD, what are the ramifications for those trying to get these apps on unix? Seems like a generic OS X-to-unix API translation would be a lot easier than Win32 API-to-unix. Not that I'm a big fan of the MS Office monopoly or the broken IE5 implementations, but it seems like this is going to have major ramifications for any application ported to Mac OS X." Of course, Microsoft promised products before which have mysteriously failed to appear, but still...interesting.

Comments

Re:Will you communists never learn?

[small_dick]

the government sometimes dictates free speech takes place over the majority view. i want that to continue.

the government mandates that someone bigger or stronger than you faces grave consequences for killing you and stealing what you own. it hasn't always been that way -- in the animal world, you would have a much shorter life than you have in our modern, western society.

when the government fails, it's because people like you turned their back on it and let the system run rampant.

like it or not, there is a place for government done well, and it screws up sometimes.

many companies develop kick ass standards and let others license it. they make great profits off this, and the consumer benefits as well.

by the way, as much as i hate correcting you monkeys, the RFC process is not monitored by a beauracracy. there would be no IRC, mail, ftp, http, etc. w/o the the RFC process. All of these protocols help different computer systems interoperate.

many standards processes are not monitored by a bureaucracy, and do quite well. products throughout your home, on the desk in front of you, in your car and on the road are proof.

you say it will lead to ruin, i'm a commie, etc. the truth is, you are an unthinking name-caller like the first poster. sometimes government makes mistakes, sometimes industry makes mistakes. the truth is, i'm not pleased with the size of our government, nor with many of it's decisions. but there are many functions it provides on a daily basis that keeps us safe, and from being ripped off by companies like microsoft.

imagine gasoline companies and auto manufacturers colluding to make engines fail early by adding contaminants to fuel. the only way to stop such a thing is through government regulation and monitoring. you think the free market will "protect" us from such a thing -- some gas company will come clean, some car manufacturer will do the right thing. history has shown you to be pitifully wrong.

example: car companies secretly buying all public transporation in los angeles and destroying it to sell more vehicles (GM did this, and was fined $1).

there are countless examples of the medical industry falsifying records to make medicine seem more effective or less dangerous. do you want your loved ones taking that medicine? (presuming you love or care about anyone).

if you still don't think the government has the right and duty to take from the privileged (in some cases) and give to the public, if your point of view is that it is always wrong, go study the phrase "riparian rights". if you still don't understand, your brain is defective.

OS X doesn't have X

[kevin805]

If Microsoft ports to OS X, it doesn't mean that a port to other BSD operating systems (and to some degree Linux) would be easier than coming straight from OS 7-9 versions or Windows, but it isn't going to help much, because the hardest part of the port, the GUI, isn't going to transfer. OS X uses a GUI system that I don't know the exact name of (is Aqua the name of the GUI, or is Aqua the API, over which the GUI runs?). It's about as far away from X as you can get (Anti-aliasing? Of course, it's automatic. Alpha channels? That too.)

Regarding the suggestion Microsoft will be porting to the Carbon APIs, I just don't see that as likely. Microsoft actually supports Macintosh really well. They wouldn't be taking a year to port to carbon. The next version they deliver will probably be built for carbon as well. Remember, the Macintosh version of IE 5 is the only standards compliant browser around that supports Java (ruling out Opera).

I really like what I've seen of OS X. If only I didn't have to buy the hardware from Apple, I might consider going to a Mac for my next machine. I wonder when we're going to get SMP G3+'s from IBM running Linux or BeOS.

more closed systems??

[small_dick]

The goal is not Microsoft on more platforms, it's the elimination of closed, proprietary protocols like exchange and active-x controls.

MSHAFT's strategy is to develop as many closed protocols as possible, and foist them on their corporate customers, hoping it will lock up the home market.

Imagine your company decides to let you work at home. If you use non-ms products at home, you night not be able to get your email or access the company web pages. You're screwed.

My main concern is the way they develop closed protocols and make workplaces "Microsoft Only" -- if the exchange server has Microserfs administering it, no mail client will work except outlook.

If the company does webpages with active-x, no browser works except IE.

The situation sucks. The only hope is that I keep seeing more ads on the job boards for Linux developers and admins.

I'm a firm believer that legislation should be enacted to force all inter-machine communication protocols to be open and documented.

Re:more closed systems??

[Darchmare]

---
I'm a firm believer that legislation should be enacted to force all inter-machine communication protocols to be open and documented.
---

Do you support mandatory diapers for everyone to prevent accidental leakage?

Nobody is putting a gun to your head forcing you to use any given product or standard. The market has decided, and no matter how inferior the choice may be, it's not the government's place to decide. Let the people do that.

Obviously if a company does something terribly immoral to hurt consumers, that's one thing. But a closed standard isn't immoral - it's just not optimal. There's a difference.

Jesus, no wonder we have such an overactive nanny culture in this country. People don't want to take responsibility for their own choices...

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

Re:more closed systems??

[dbarclay10]

I bet you consider yourself a realist. Actually, in reality, you're an idealist. You see, in the ideal Free World of Capitalism, products get bought for good reasons. Maybe not because the products themselves are better, but maybe because they're cheaper. Or a nice person made them. But in reality, the marketplace is not controlled by the consumer. You're saying that we don't have to use closed, proprietary protocols. Well, that's all the manufacturers are making. If you don't use closed-source, you don't use at all. So, instead of the consumers making their choices, it's the manufacturers.

True, a hundred years ago, this couldn't have happened. If Smith & Weston made a crappy revolver, then people would have bought from somewhere else. Unfortunatly, now there are many industries where the only game in town has all the power. Such people/corporations gained so much power, originally, because they has something to offer their customers.

You say that the government should stay out of these cases. Well, let's examine that further. You say this, probably, because the government shouldn't be allowed to control too much of any populace. Most people in the western world(of which I am a member) have grown up with the idea of the People's Power. It is our patriotic duty to keep our governments in line, whether it be by voting, demonstrating, or in rare, extreme cases, revolution. What I assert is that the things you're trying to prevent are happening right NOW, but not by your government. The control has left the hands of the elected and leap into the hands of the corporate powerful.

So, next time you wish to express your belief that large organizations should not tell us what to do and where to do it, you should also take into account the fact that these days, the government doesn't control us nearly as much as commercial enterprise does.

Thank you.

Dave

Re:more closed systems??

[small_dick]

geez...i can't believe you slept through BOTH your history classes and your philosophy classes...

anyway, when you control the medium, you control the content. that's history. soviet union, china, nazi germany...in fact, that's why we have laws (strong laws) controling who controls how mauch bandwidth, particularly in radio and tv.

it makes it much easier for people/companies to compete when you have standards. that is, someone can't take over networking by coming up with some oddball networking standard --- the IEEE takes recommendations and codifies them. You would probably no be a happy camper if none of your network cards would talk to each other.

Or if your Honda (you seem like a honda owner, dunno why) had proprietary rims, such that you could only go to the honda dealer for tires. standards again.

I'm taking about between machines -- a natural place for standards. they are often placed in this position.

And what of philosophy? We're stronger together than apart. One of the basics of philosophy, and why government exists. Forgot about that, eh? You must have been too busy calling me names to think about any of this.

As far as "...no ones putting a gun to your head to use any given product or standard...", you are literally correct. It's not a physical gun, but it is a virtual one -- if you don't use microsoft at home, you can't take advantage of the work-at-home program I mentioned. Probable result : discrimination that would be very hard to prove.

Hmmm...I've dealt with your type before. When a gang of thugs starts breaking down your door to get at your wife and daughters, guess who will be calling the 911 line "Oh, help, nanny help, I'm not strong enough to deal with these thugs. Please send over the police I paid for with my taxes, driving on standardized tires and armed with lots of standard weapons!!

There are standards all around you, that get you through every one of your days. Goverment and international standards, on poer tranmission (so your toaster doesn't have to be made by the same company that made the power generation plant).

How can you be so ignorant. I'm not saying companies can't innovate, or that they all have to write the same OS, all I'm saying is they make protocols using the existing RFC mechanism or something like it.

Check out the press release...

[toastyman]

Here is what Microsoft has to say. Notice they don't actually mention OS X at all, but I'm sure it's an implied thing... While porting Office to a Posix/Unix style OS is a lot of work, porting the GUI to X/Windows will surely be a bigger task, should they try to do it.

What's actually scarier... Follow the link on the bottom of that press release to this.

Word 2001 introduces the Data Merge Manager, a feature available first for the Mac that simplifies and consolidates into a single window the entire process of using data to conduct mass communications via e-mail or letter. Tight integration with the new e-mail and personal information manager makes it easy to merge contacts from the Address Book into a bulk mailing.

Eeeek! Is it me, or does it sound like Microsoft is giving every Mac user who buys Office some mass spam software? :)

-- Kevin

Re:Bad Grammar

[divec]

Why...why do people insist on matching plural verbs with singular nouns? [...] Microsoft is an "it". Not a "they".

<sigh> Why do you care? Even if you were correct about your grammatical point, and what you say didn't fly in the face of widespread accepted contemporary usage, what difference does it make? This is a news site, not a grammar site! The amendment you suggest doesn't make the paragraph easier to read.

Do you object every time "data" is used as a singular noun? Do you insist on referring to countries, cars and ships as "she"? If so, you're missing a profound point: language usage changes! It changes due to the unconscious use of new constructions by native speakers. And so it should. English is designed to be parsed by humans, not SGML parsers. Its grammar is not only more flexible, but also more dynamic, than that of SGML. When you ask people to "make the most of the language", you're really trying to persuade them to end this dynamic adaptation and relegate the language to something like SGML.

Re:Critisizing IE5?

[Ranger Rick]

Not only that, but IE5 on macintosh is one of the best-conforming browsers on the market right now.

I like how in this article they point out that very little code is shared between the mac and windows teams. That much is obvious, since IE5 on windows conforms so poorly, yet the mac one is just fine. Perhapse Microsoft doesn't need a lesson from us, they need a lesson from some of their own people. ;)

:wq!

eh

[/]

You'll find that the "*nix community" isn't going to be the only bunch of people using Linux in the near future. There are plenty of businesses who'd love to dump NT if they still get to run Office.

And btw, do yourself a favor and download and use icab instead of IE.

Re:Completely wrong

[RevAaron]

Close. OS X doesn't have three user interfaces, but three programmign interfaces (APIs). There is BSD, Carbon, and Cocoa. BSD is what it sounds like; Carbon is a port of a cleaned up version of the current Mac OS toolbox (the API Mac OS uses); and Cocoa, is simply the next version of the OpenStep API, which is object oriented, and quite sophisticated. Carbon allows pretty easy porting of current Mac OS applications to Mac OS X. The Carbon API also exists on the traditional Mac OS, so you can produce a binary for Mac OS 8 - 9 and Mac OS X with a compiler flag, and making changes to have it run on System 7 shouldn't be too hard either. It's for these reasons many Mac OS X developers coming from previous Mac development will use Carbon. You're getting Carbon confused with Classic. Classic is an appliation which runs on Mac OS X which runs a copy of Mac OS 9 in emulation for the purpose of running non-ported prorgams. Carbon isn't as a nice of an API as Cocoa is, but it does take advantage of all of the advantages Mac OS X has over it's predecessors. When MS says they'll have Office 2001 on OS X, they're most likely to use Carbon, for the above reasons. What does this mean in the context of getting MS apps on Unix in general? Not much. Carbon and Cocoa are portable APIs, and do not require Unix at all. ARDI is trying to implement Carbon on top of Linux/X and Windows toward the end of portable programs. Apple themselves has an older version of the Cocoa API available on Windows, as a part of WebObjects development. My point? Mac OS X doesn't use X, but it's own Display PDF window server. But that doesn't matter at all. It all depends on whether or not the API is implemented on the target platform. If an app was written in Cocoa for Mac OS X, there's a good chance, sometime in the future, they could very easily be ported to Linux and other Unices via GNUstep, an implementation of the OpenStep/YellowBox/Cocoa API, which is coming along slowly, but very surely. Porting an app from Mac OS X/Cocoa to Linux/GNUstep shouldn't be that hard, as it's a high-level API. The companies writting these apps simply need an ecomical incentive to do so.

Agghhhh! Nobody has explained this right!

[Bill Daras]

OS X has two main APIs.

Coccoa, which is the revised OpenStep API with a few new tricks.

Carbon, which is the OS 7,8,9, etc API minus the cruft, which allows software makers to create native OS X apps with only minor modification (Photoshop was ported within two weeks). It is not an emulator.

Classic, a OS 9 Virtual Machine is used for running Classic MacOS apps.

Microsoft would port to either Carbon or Coccoa. They wouldn't even touch the BSD innards. Now a simple trip to http://www.apple.com/macosx/ could have answered this question in about 30 seconds. Next time Slashdot should use some care, not just post anything that includes "Office, ported and BSD or Linux" in the same message.

don't mean nuthin

[Rhonabwy]

Microsoft is porting things to Mac OS X, sure - but they'll be porting to the "Carbon" interfaces - the same old Mac style API's - with only a few twists.

Even if they did port this all to "Aqua", it still a completely different windowing environment, and wouldn't mean squat for any of the other other *bsd environments.

Actually won't help UNIX that much at all.

[be-fan]

Apparently, people don't seem to understand that MacOSX is not a UNIX from the developer sense. A modern MacOSX developer is sure to use the Cocoa API so that their apps appear to be like the other apps that MacOS X users will be used to. As such, their application still won't be portable to UNIX. I mean technically, it should be simple to port apps between BeOS and Linux, since they both use a POSIX base. However, a significant amount of code in a productivity app is user interface code that is tied to the UI system. Since MacOS X uses a different windowing system, even if the Office people use the BSD API for the port, it would still be hard to port to Linux/BSD/X.

Completely wrong

[drix]

Seems encouraging, doesn't it?

Don't get your hopes up.

The OS X MS Office ports are written such that OS X basically emulates the OS 9 operating environment for them. There is not an ounce of Unix code in these ports.

MacOS X has three user interfaces, one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now. This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.

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