Porting OpenOffice To OSX

jeffy124 writes "ZDnet has an interesting article on how OpenOffice, Sun's Open-Source version of StarOffice, needs some serious help in being ported to the Macintosh OS-X. With Microsoft about to release Office 2001 for OS-X and demo it at next week's MacWorld Expo, support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead."

Comments

Re:no thanks

[PCM2]

Please keep this to yourselves. MacOS does not need any programs with inconsistent interfaces that don't obey the user interface guidelines.

Yeah, no kidding. Whoever is out there making software like QuickTime 4/5, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Sherlock, iMovie, iTunes, and iDVD -- they're the type that's screwing up the Mac platform for everybody.
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What about Abiword?

[VValdo]

Right now there's a one-man effort at Abiword to port this cross-platform, GPL'd word processor to OS X. I know that Hubert Figuiere would appreciate any contribution to the project.

To read the latest discussion on Abiword development, check out this page.

I wonder how many people have tried MacGIMP because Adobe's taking so long to release Photoshop for OS X? Judging from some of the chat boards, I'm guessing a lot.

W
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Issues with OpenOffice.

[GiMP]

First, before anyone asks.. OpenOffice is licensed under the following licenses.
GNU General Public License (GPL)
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)
further information: http://www.openoffice.org/license.html

The problem I find with contributing to OpenOffice is that they will not accept code submissions over 10 lines of code if one has not assigned copyright to Sun. This can not be done electronically, only by snail mail or fax.

I was considering helping but I'd like to keep my copyright. Also, I'd have to sell out the bucks for the upgrade to OSX :)

BTW, to those who asked.. openoffice just opens a large window and draws its own widgets inside of it, so the platform issue of toolkits/apis is at a minimum.

Re:Issues with OpenOffice.

[devphil]

The problem I find with contributing to OpenOffice is that they will not accept code submissions over 10 lines of code if one has not assigned copyright to Sun.

So? This is the exact same policy that the FSF has for all the core GNU programs and libraries. There's just way too much danger that some contributor will donate an entire module, wait until it becomes widespread and useful, and then claim exclusive ownership and demand money, i.e., "pull a Unisys/GIF."

What alternative would you suggest that would keep the code and coders safe from the lawyers?

This can not be done electronically, only by snail mail or fax.

Again, just like the FSF. (Well, you email the initial form, they snailmail you the document, you sign the document and mail it back.) This is how American law currently works, is all.

I was considering helping but I'd like to keep my copyright.

Dunno about Sun, but the form that you sign for the FSF gives you the right to pull back the copyright (given a month's notice in writing). Of course, I would expect that when you do that, everything you've donated to the project will get removed, but then that's probably the person's whole point of withdrawing the copyright assignment in the first place.

Too little WAY too late.

[ShieldWolf]

MS Office X will be available sometime i the forth quarter, OpenOffice is well over a year away from even having a rudimentary presense on OS X. This project should have started two years ago if it wanted any hope of acheiving the stated goals (have an open solution on OS X at the same time Office X is released). Furthermore OpenOffice is being pulled in ten directions at once - gnome/gtk+ - windows - XUL. Pulling in one more (quartx) won't help matters much. Microsoft _will_ achieve dominance on OS X, it is a certainty, the question is whether others will be able to crawl up or pull it down. That question is open, but a jihad to beat them to the punch is an obvious distaster.

-Shieldwolf

It's not about dominance

[scotpurl]

It's not about dominating one market. It's about options being available, AND people actually making use of the options.

I'm sure I could write a mission critical application using the Atari 2600, thereby making sure that someone doesn't "dominate" the market. Whether or not anyone will actually use it.....

Rushing a port of this thing out is exactly the wrong thing to do. Having a buggy piece of software available will delight few, and alienate most. You want to be best to market, not first to market.

Re:wish it could be me...

[quigonn]

StarOffice/OpenOffice is not GTK+ based. Stardivision used to have their own widget library that acts as "frontend" for other widget libraries. That means the most work for doing a new port was actually porting the widget library called "StarView" to the new platform's native widget library.

Re:There's a lot of work to be done

[Noer]

I agree, porting this to have a nice Cocoa-based GUI wrapper would be a LOT of work. OTOH, the same is true with GIMP, which may be more worthwhile (maybe). I do wonder if just starting a Cocoa office suite from scratch might be a good idea. Any old NeXT users around? What was "the" word processor for NeXTStep? Was there one? Does it still exist, and if so, who owns it? I know "the" spreadsheet was Mesa, which rocks.

Frankly, I've been pinning my hopes on Nisus, which is rewriting Writer for Cocoa (not Carbon) and has always had a sweet word processor. However, these days, just a good wp and spreadsheet isn't enough; people want integration with that abomination powerpoint (ugh, the bane of corporate presentations... not cuz the app sucks, but cuz the presentations suck), the worst database ever (access), and other MS garbage.

Frankly, I think the most crucial feature of an office suite is TRANSPARENT handling of ALL the features (cruft) of MSOffice documents - revisions, that stupid highlighting stuff, etc - and that's hard to do. I still worry that many users will be "forced" into using MSOffice, not because better suites aren't available, but because MS has embraced/extended what a word processor or spreadsheet should do to the point where nobody can really compete.

Hidden APIs?

[Galvatron]

And what hidden APIs would those be? The ones Wine was able to re-implement from scratch? For that matter, as stupid as it is, "shared source" DOES mean that programmers can go in and look at the code for Windows, thereby revealing any and all "hidden APIs."

I think you forgot your anti-paranoia pills...

The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

Enough With The Monopoly

[Utterer]

I am a Mac user and I *gasp* use Microsoft products. I just can't stand the constant bashing of MS by Mac users. Don't get me wrong, MS has messed up on the Mac before with just about everything before Office 98, but that was 3 years ago, time to move on.

I use Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Office 98 daily with no problems at all. Compare this to bloat/shovelware Netscape and their inability to release a stable browser in years that requires less than 30 megs of RAM.

I will continue to use MS office products as well over some unstable open source port that will never have the dedicated update support that a money making company can provide.

Wanted: Free Help

[duffbeer703]

Sun Microsystems needs an experienced developer to lead a team of volunteers in porting Sun's OpenOffice application to Mac OS 10.

The candidate will be compensated soley by free Sun t-shirts, mousepads and mugs. No salary or fringe benefits are available.

Crossplatform Compatability

[LoudMusic]

I could be way off, but it seems that crossplatform compatability is the biggest deal here. I work in an office of 40 Windows computers and 25 Macintosh computers. We use Microsoft Office because we can share files so easily with eachother and people outside the office. All our vendors and clients use MS Office. Microsoft knows how to make software speak "MS Office" better than anyone else ... because they wrote it. And that's the biggest issue, being able to share with others.

Even if OpenOffice blows MS Office away, MS already has a strong foot hold that even the new people want to be able to communicate with, trouble free.

~LoudMusic

Try to emulate Office...

[Bonker]

Let's be honest here. Why is MS Office so popular? A lot of people will say 'ease of use', but it's really just that most people who use it are used to the set of features and mentality that Microsoft has gotten everyone familiar with. Open Office if anything, is easier to use than MS Office. Still, getting it to run on OSX, programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'.

Competition to Office already exists!

[megaduck]

People here seem to be forgetting that Apple has been producing their own Office competitor for some time. It's called AppleWorks, and the latest version (6.2) is an OS X native application. Sure, it may not have all of the bells and whistles that Office has, but it does everything that I need it to, including:

Open MS Word and Excel files.

WYSIWYG word processing with all of the standard gizmos (spell check, mail merge, etc.).

OLE style drag-and-drop functionality for video clips\sound files\whatever.

PowerPointish presentation software.

A decent spreadsheet and database.

Plus it integrates super-well with all of Apple's other software, such as iMovie and Quicktime. All that, for a third (or less) of the cost of M$ Office. I got my copy yesterday, and I'm very pleased with it.

While I would love to see OpenOffice for my platform, I don't feel that I'm without options. One of the beautiful things about OS X is that it's still a free-for-all and there are no dominant applications. Without a stranglehold on the OS, Microsoft has to compete just like everyone else.

fair face off?

[Proud Geek]

I wonder if this will finally be a fair test of OpenOffice against MS Office? They are both available for Windows platforms also, but there Microsoft has the big advantage of hidden API's and the like.

For OS X, they will both be running natively using only Apple's public API's, and we will get to see how much better OpenOffice is when not running on a crippled MS Windows platform.

There's a lot of work to be done

[tb3]

Sun has released the project to the community (which I intrepret as dis-owning it) with a lot left unfinished. 42 of 89 modules don't compile, there is no UNICODE support, no printer support, no sound support , no drag-and-drop support, and the Windowing code is X-11.

They're recommending using C++ and C to call the OS X Windowing APIs, which doesn't sound like a good idea, since the GUI could be built much quicker with Objective-C and AppBuilder.

It almost seems that building a MacOffice from scratch would be easier than this port, but I'm no expert in porting projects.

"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"

Sucking even more is not the solution

[sjonke]

Trying to transparently support all Microsoft Office features and file formats is doomed to failure. It's not that Microsoft Office is better or not, it's that they are the standard and when Microsoft adds a new feature (and they always do, whether or not it is actually a good thing) all the software trying to be 100% compatible is instantly behind the curve. You can never do better than remain behind. I.e suck even more. Sucking even more is not the path to success last I checked.

The only way to go is to create an open file format for documents and then get enough companies/groups on as many OSs as possible to create much better applications than what Microsoft so pathetically offers. This does not mean, as Microsoft believes, piling on the features whether or not they are actually a good thing nor whether or not they are implemented well. It means doing the basics the best and innovating intelligently. We need to put them behind the curve, and in an open source, widely available, very easy to use way. That and perform a whole heck of a lot of human sacrifices.

Microsoft dominates without justification, as always, but I believe it is possible to topple them. Everyone gave up on being better a long time ago and instead tried to emulate. Now it's time to bring back real advances.