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MS Office for OSX? Why not for Unix as Well?
technode asks: "Apple
has released OSX, which appears to be an amalgam of NetBSD, and
NexTStep, and other stuff. There is, or will be, undoubtedly, a
'native mode' office suite for OSX. If there is an Office suite for
OSX, then why not for other Unixes? To do it once requires solving
the basic problem of mapping Office onto the Unix/X-windows API. Once
you have that piece, it seems like the only thing preventing a Linux
MS Office Suite is MS desire to preserve their OS market share. Technically,
this begins to seem a little bit like using one's market share in the
applications business to protect one's market share in the OS
business, which would, on the face of it, seem to be an anti-trust
no-no. What gives?" Most people don't seem to understand that
"native-mode" OSX isn't necessarily Unix compatible. Macs have had their own GUI toolbox for a long time, and I would assume that if
Office does show for OSX, that it would be an easy port to
other Unicies. This doesn't even go into the horrendous track record
with regards to security that Microsoft has garnered, especially
over the past few years. Does Unix really need Office at this
point? Update: 12/29 1pm EDT by C :The wording above is incorrect. To clarify: an OS X
version of Office would not be an easy port to Unix. Sorry for the miswording, there.
Because MS owns a nice chunk of Apple, it's in their best interest. We all know how MS feels about Linux.
Office for MacOS X doesn't use X11, it uses the native OS X GUI. IIRC they are using Carbon, a transitional API from older MacOS's to OS X.
what do you mean IF it shows? its available NOW
you can even download a demo version(Word, kinda cripple-ware I think)
Also, the code has nothing to do with unix, its all Cocoa (or is it Carbon?)
Also, most problems with Office security are from VBScript stuff being enabled by default (bad!)
Office has been released for OS X. Offive v.X has been available for some time...
We don't need MS Office... the only thing that would be really useful is a full-featured MS Office file filters.
"Does Unix really need Office at this point? "
Yes i think it does. What do most people use their machines for in the office? My lawer writes letters on his laptop. My accountants does spreadsheets. I write reports (ok so i use Lyx for scientific ones)
A good office suit is important and while Abiword is fast and more than most people use MS Office is a brand name.
You could say the same things about Internet Explorer as well?
mac OSX is based on nextstep and freebsd, and it's not a question of if Microsoft will port Office to osx, because they already have, it's been out for months. I dont really understand this agrument, obviously MS could make a version of Office for linux, but i dont think the osx port would make that any easyer, the gui of mac osx is a lot different from X11.
Under OS X, the GUI is not an X server. It's a lot more advanced than X, which has its pros and cons.
For example, it supports transparency natively, and z-coordinates. But it isn't network-transparent out of the box.
In any case, yes, you could to Office on *nix if you were to port Cocoa or Carbon to the platform of choice, but i don't see Apple doing that anytime soon.
IE for Solaris is based on a partial port of win32 to solaris--with this you could theoretically port office for win32 to Solaris and therefore *nix.
Anyway, don't confuse OS X with a Real Unix with Real X Windows. Support for X on OSX is a third-party effort at best.
All we really need is pico. All I needed with Windows was notepad. If I wanted to impress someone, I'd pull out wordpad. All three of these come free with their respective OS.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Office v.X is what is called a "Carbon" app. It uses a subset of the old Mac APIs to work on OS X. No such API exists on any unix, so it would require rewriting the entire GUI aspect of the program to run on another UNIX.
This was Apple's way of making it easy to port apps from the "old" MacOS to OS X. You just have to make sure you are not using the parts of the old APIs that are "naughty" under OS X (directly access hardware, etc.) and you are good to go.
Whats Next, Office for my toaster? Enough Already!
I was one of the beta testers for Office X. They've fixed many bugs since Office 2001 under Mac OS 9 and cleaned up the interface in Entourage. However, don't look for a full *nix port any time soon.
What MS Has done is comply with Apple's new API to the OS. Office X is NOT a UNIX application, it's still a Mac Application. All the code is Mac PowerPC code and uses Apple's "Carbon" and maybe some "Coco" code (but I'm not positive on the last one). It works well, it's fast and it's developed by a real Mac programming team as opposed to the abismal ports of Word 6 for example.
The truth of the matter is, Apple needs MS and MS Needs Apple (whether or not they want to admit it). I do not think that MS will be porting Office X to other *nixes any time in the future.
-- DuckWing
This question needs a bit more research.
Office is out for Mac OS X, and it looks fantastic. They redid something like 800 menu and dialog boxes specifically for OS X.
So, while you solve the problem of how to install it on a UNIX filesystem, the GUI part of it is very heavily dependent on Aqua (OS X does not use X-Windows by default).
For the GUI, MacOS X 'native' apps use Carbon (the 'classic' MacOS APIs) or 'Cocoa' (the NeXT APIs).
These APIs are not present on other Unices.
And more applications certainly never hurt.
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
why do u need MS office for Unix when there is and Star Office, which is great and free...
Who controls the information, controls the world...
In a word. Yes.
Office and the Outlook/Exchange combo is the single most important factor stopping businesses from switching to Linux on the desktop
It already is, and I am using it. OSX does not use X Windows (although there is the XonX project, which is an X manager for OSX), so porting Office to Linux is not a recompilation, but a port to yet another window manager.
Polar bears are rectangular bears after a coordinate change.
Its about the document format. Microsoft controls the future of what is called .doc file and what isn't. Same with .xls spreadsheets. Any desktop will need robust interaction and access to the future of those file formats.
The weak link in Microsoft accomplishing an Office on Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD, unfortunately, is XFree86. Apple gets around this with Aqua/Quartz and video-card integration (nVidia and ATI).
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Does Unix really need Office at this point?
Of course not; Unix is dead on the desktop. Where have you silly people been for the last decade?
Yes, but it will only run on Microsoft Linux!
The entire Quartz graphic subsystem that Apple uses has nothing to do with X-windows (in fact, X-windows apps do not run natively under Quartz/Aqua); similarly, the Carbon layer that Office is written on top of is basically a modernized version of the Classic Mac OS that only requires developers to re-write up to 20% of their code, and has very little to do with the BSD layer. Sure, BSD CLI apps run fine under OS X, but to think that Quartz/Aqua is in any way, shape, or form related to X-windows is to miss a large part of what OS X is about.
Other than Outlook, MS Office is a pretty damn good program(s). I ran a test on a couple employees at work with StarOffice (Mandrake 8) vs. MS Office and after 30 days of consistant use, they still preffered the MS Product for it's ease of use and integration. As much as I don't like MS (AIX, Netware and Linux servers), I have to admit that for the most-part, MS Office is a good product and very likely MS's best.
tinfoilmedia
Apple and MS would like nothing less than making ANY viable desktop tool available for free Unices. They both use patented streaming media protocols to block the development of streaming media viewers for free Unices. And Office is not going to be available anytime soon.
Right now free Unices have a tiny fraction of the desktop market. And Apple and Microsoft have NO interest in making it easier for anyone to switch. If it were not for the browser war, Office for Mac would be already gone, and its viability as a desktop platform would be gone as well.
These decisions have little to do with how easy it would be to port Office. Let's face it, Microsoft probably already has Office for Linux ready to ship. They BANK a billion dollars a month, so they can certainly afford the development effort required, and it would be good conservative strategy to have it ready should it be needed someday. But unless the trial settlement changes dramatically, that day is no time soon. Right now, anyone who deals with other people who use Word (which is to say almost everyone) needs to have access to a copy of Word. Until that changes, Microsoft will not port Office anywhere else. That it exists for Mac is a result of the 'kill netscape' deal made between Mac and Microsoft.
I have a full copy of Office for OS X 10.1. I'm running it right now. It's written using Carbon an Cocoa which are distinctly Macintosh libraries. Without reimplementing those systems, which is much of what Apple has been doing for the last... 10 years, there is no way office would run on Linux/Unix.
.NET implementations.
Right now porting Office in itself to Linux probably would be just as much of an undertaking as porting it to the Mac and Mac OS X was.
I think if we see Office every for Linux, it will most likely be running on wine or one of the free
yes we do need office for linux at this point.
Being as a fully functional office suite which is completley compatible to Microsoft version and is as user friendly, is the only thing keeping me from rolling out unix on the desktop at my office.
I had to go to Ford World Headquarters to train on their new platform-independant Ford Supplier Network website. I was amazed at the money Ford dumped into the oracle backend, ie/netscape compatibility, and commitment Ford had made to making their site OS independant. That was until I found out it was a big OS independant site used to download excel and Word documents.
AWG
A nice little bonus would be if Netscape could run activeX components
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
what is the status of MS Office support under WINE? I know it is not an offical port from Microsoft, but with thier whacky licensing schemes I doubt I would want it ported. Well, if I were ported I wouldnt be able to afford it anyway, esp with free office suites like OpenOffice and Koffice. Right now they may not have ALL the features of MS Office but am sure they will quickly improve.
GNUstep!
The last time I checked, the #1 reason Linux on the desktop is going nowhere is because there is no Linux version of MS Office.
How many times do we have to have this discussion? OSX has BSD and Nextstep roots. It also has classic mac roots. This API, known as carbon is an updating of the classical Mac APIs. This API is what MS is using to bring Office to OSX. I've heard rumors that MS is developing the next version of Office in Cocoa, (the NextStep derivative API), this version could in theory be run on GNUStep, but this rumor is unlikely to actually be true.
Regardless that this whole question should be marked as -1, Troll, I wonder if the person who asked the question bothered to do even the most basic research at all.
Mac OS X has UNIX at its heart, yes. But on top of that foundation are several proprietary layers (most notably "Aqua," the display-PDF based GUI) that have no equivalent in, for example, Linux. This is what makes OS X different than Yet Another UNIX + Window Manager. The worst part is, this has been covered on Slashdot over and over and over again. Not to mention that the Carbon/Cocoa API's have no equivalent outside of the Mac (Cocoa is BASED on NeXTSTEP, yes, but isn't exactly the same).
Secondly, Office V.X was announced almost a year ago, and has been on sale for a couple months now. Microsoft has indicated that they will no longer be developing Office 2001 (the last version that ran on Mac OS 9, released in 2000) and focusing on development of OS X-only products exclusively (in the Mac market, that is).
-A.
What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
Is OSX the new UNIX? Why not OSX instead of the traditional UNIX's. The usual XWindows apps are being ported to OSX, take a look at Gnu Darwin, Easy to install distributions are being offered by others too.
Jobs was smart by going after a market he stood a chance of capturing, instead of butting heads with MS.
BTW, I still run Linux, but not as much since OSX has become faster and flush with now software.
photosMy Photostream
- Bloat. MS Office defies the basic principles of UNIX. It will
probably need to run as root and make our systems unstable. Do we need
this?
- No freedom. This is a step in the wrong direction for those of us who
prefer to use 'cvs update' instead of service packs to update our systems.
- Monopoly leveraging. Microsoft will undoubtedly engineer their
.Net
"features" into new versions of Office. Don't be surprised if you, as a
UNIX user, will need a Passport account just to run Word.
- Monopoly extension. Why would anyone work on improving Koffice,
StarOffice, or LaTeX if MS Office exists on the UNIX platform? The
competitors would start out at a huge disadvantage and know there's no
place in the market for them.
Now, on the plus side:- User friendliness. MS Office provides a seamless transition for
lusers who have grown up with Windows and don't know anything else.
- World domination. Anything that helps us replace inferior desktop OSs is a good thing,
evolution-wise and principle-wise.
- Hackability. UNIX is a far superior platform for hackers because of
the wide array of debugging tools available, so it will make reverse
engineers' jobs easier.
It is obvious that the cons outweigh the pros here by sheer numbers. But given the recent strides made by the Koffice team, it will only be a matter of time before their product is superior to MS Office in every respect.-Uncle
It has (sadly) been a while since I've written code for the Mac; most of my experience was in the pre-Carbon/Cocoa era. However, I poked around inside Word and see that it's a Carbon application. This means that it uses APIs based upon "classic" Mac programming but which work in the Classic and OS X environments. So I would assume that the Unix bits are hidden in the Carbon libraries which won't be ported to Linux anytime soon.
Office for OS X is available now.
It uses the Mac specific API for display, not a generic Unix X model.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
For Microsoft to make Office work with OS X, they only had to tweak existing Office code work with Apple's Carbon APIs. For all they know, Mac OS X could be based on BeOS. This is far from any kind of port, and most likely didn't require nearly the amount of man hours that a port would.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Linux/BSD's security track record is no better than Microsoft's. The things we have going for us:
- source code, so we can spot and fix bugs faster
- non-homogeniety (I didn't worry much about the overflows in PINE, since with all the jillions of architectures and versions it was extremely unlikely that someone would create an exploit or worm specifically for my version and machine.)
But we all have the same factors working against us:
- Writing software in inappropriately low-level languages (C/C++), where security holes are possible because the language makes it easy for programmers to make mistakes which can lead to exploits
- Writing software in or supporting scripting languages (perl, VBS) which make it easy to write broken CGI/etc. scripts on unix or easy to write worms on Windows. (Actually, now that perl is standard-issue on unix systems, it would seem that a cross-platform scripted worm would be relatively simple to pull off.)
- Ad-hoc (if even) code-review procedures. My favorite example is the MD5 Crypt code in PAM (a very important module for security!!) -- it's clear to me that nobody ever read this code before making it standard. Take a look.
Not only does Unix/Linux/etc not need Office now, we never HAVE needed Office, and in fact MS Office would be a BAD thing. Come on, you guys know this.. Imagine if Office came out for Unix now. A lot of newbie Linux users purchase it, maybe some companies, maybe a few experienced users, etc. They get to where they depend on it. Three years later there's an upgrade. It's required and it's not available on Unix. Whaddayaknow, the Unix users are screwed. Many of them are forced to get Windows. What Unix NEEDS is educated consumers who can understand things like LaTeX, etc...
thats like syaing porting mozilla from
gtk to windows would be 'no big deal'.
you are an idiot. have you ever fucking
programmed anything past a simulation
of you having sex with a sheep?
at the very fucking least they will need quartz
for linux. oh yeah, dont forget carbon and
cocoa and all those other fucking libraries
that apple has spent several million hours
designing and implementing and testing.
your notion that microsoft should be sued
for 'anti-trust' violation because they
didnt spend 5 billion hours porting
office to linux is just idiotic. thats like
saying SUN should be sued for not porting
staroffice to windows because sun is attempting
to 'shut windows users out of the market
and leverage its unix OS'. which is probably
what sun would be doing, but anyways.
you are a bunch of brainless zealot
group-think fuckheads, eat shit and die.
While Word for Linux wouldn't be a bad thing for the Linux community, I don't think it's the hottest thing needed. There's a slew of word processing programs for Linux, several of which can handle .doc pretty well. Sure, John Q. Public might be more likely to use Linux if he could use Word itself... But I digress.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Although internally OS X is a UNIX, the GUI toolkit that it uses, Cocoa is not X11, and has nothing to do with it. Most of the low-level jobs are done using PostScript, and the high-level APIs are in Objective C.
Because of that, Cocoa is even further from Linux than native Windows APIs. The closest thing to Cocoa on Linux is Qt, but they still have such substancial differences that easy porting is not an option.
MacosX does have office.
;)
But there are multiple ways to program for os X, let me explain them:
classic: program for macos9 and have it run in the macos9 emulator called classic. (c/c++)
carbon: program for macos9 and macosx natively, this means that the app will run in both macos9 and X without classic. (c/c++)
cocoa: program for macosx. this will run in macosX natively but won't run in macos9 (java and obj C only)
POSTIX: just like coding for linux, if the user has xwindows installed you can use xwindows. or just normal C, perl, pascal, whatever CLI apps.
I belief that M$ office is coded in carbon, this means that it would still need to be ported to X windows, that would be quite a task comparted to porting from macos9 to macosX, not to mention that the macos code-base is totally different from the windows code base.
DISCLAMER: some of the facts, thoughts, ideas in this post might be completely wrong, in that case, please correct me
Sig you!
"Oh no no no, there is no Cocoa for any other platform but my beloved fruit one!"
Hey, guys? Would you like to port all your Cocoa apps to GNU/Linux/X? What's that? It can't be done? Shut up. It can and it will.
GNUstep.
Because Cocoa is just OpenStep.
I think that fact is very much overlooked by the Mac user base, and by slashdot, because slashdot is that stupid.
Doesn't anyone of you remember that MS Excel was on Mac first? Whatever, it's been a long, long, long time, MS has always made an Office for the Macintosh. Long before Linux was anywhere useable. And of course now their politics forbid making a Linux port. Because, like they said, they would have to opensource even their souls as soon as they would touch anything GNU. :)
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't OSX based on GNU Hurd?
and actually a much better example would
be to port galeon to kde, since galeon
uses about 25-30 gnome libraries such
as 'gnome-vfs' 'oaf' etc etc etc.
Be serious! Do we need Windows/Linux if we could have OSX?!
NO!
The only thing is the expensive PPC-Hardware. So, if Apple would port the whole damn OSX on Intel we would ALL switch on OSX, right?!! Damn I would!
!-- think, learn, forget [Frederic Vester]
Even though Microsoft does have problems with security when it comes to their operating systems, MS Office is one of the greatest office suites out there, which is the real reason Microsoft has the power it has now. I'm not sure about MS Outlook for the Mac, but I don't think there would be any high-risk security issues involving any of the other MS Office apps.
You die too easily.
> Does Unix really need Office at this point?
You have to define need.
Is it need from the perspective of long-time Linux/UNIX users? Those that feel Microsoft software is unstable and filled with security holes will likely say, "No! We don't NEED Microsoft Office."
Or is it need from the perspective of prospective users? Users that come from a Microsoft dominated platform will likely say, "If it doesn't have Microsoft Office then it isn't compatible with how we work and it's not what we NEED."
Which is it?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I don't think *nix's need office but the ability to create and open native M$ Word, and Excel documents in *nix would greatly help (at least me) completely abandon having to use _any_ M$ products.
Office for OSx has been out now for a couple of months, so this is a pretty old comment to make. The GUI for OSx is Carbon.
I've made my transition away from Wintel machines over to the Apple OS. Gives me no problems, and I get the benefit of not having to beg for games/apps to be ported over like the Linux users. I enjoy Linux as much as the next guy, but FOR ME (to avoid flamage), Apple is the way to go. I get the power of a *nix, with the usability of Apple. I can develop a program with an incredible GUI, with the pretty decent power of BSD.
Don't knock it fellas, deep down, it's a pretty powerful OS. And Office for X is better than the Winders version.
It's time for my Saturday morning rant. I'm really getting sick tired of hearing people whine about MS Office. Whine, whine, whine. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Moan, moan, moan. After, oh, at least three years of nagging I think I've reached my limit.
I don't want and don't care about Microsoft's crapware any more. StarOffice 5.2 works great for me. Even though it's a bit long in the tooth, by now, it does everything that I could possibly need an office suite to do. Three months ago I completely wiped MS Office off my Windows partition (because I needed the disk space) and I haven't missed it since. SO 5.2 does everything I want - letters, mailing labels, and spreadsheets.
Yes, 5.2 is a bit bloated, but if you have a problem with that, do you think that MS Office would turn out any slimmer? Are you really naive enough to think that its WIN32 API emulation layer is going to turn out any better. Don't forget that the Solaris' version of MS Internet Explorer actually went ahead and created a fscking registry when you ran it. You really want to deal with this kind of crap?
Well, I don't. I'm looking forward to SO 6.0, which promises to be a significant improvement over 5.2, it's going to be a native Linux application, and not some overbloated, macro virus-injecting monstrosity that comes complete with its own mini-operating system.
Plus there's also KOffice, which is moving along rather nicely. In short, I really don't see what's so special about MS Office that people are always drooling about.
Cocoa which is the old NEXT api upgraded and tweeked to MacOSX. It can be used from object C and java.
Apple wasn't getting super good feedback from developers about porting all there apps to Cocoa so apple under pressure released....
The Carbon api, which is a bit like the old mac os (I think like 80-90% the same). This allowed companies to rewrite existing apps for OS-X easily.
These are the 2 native api layers for OSx. Older apps (mac os 7-8-9) still run in a compatability mode.
Oreilly has an article on Carbon/Cocoa that is quite good.
Microsoft is using Carbon for there port..So not as super easy to port.. But then again they just might not want to port it....
I wish we had Office 98 for UNIX.
Office 2000 and XP are shit.
Does Unix really need Office at this point?
.DOC and .XML.
While you ponder this question, I will sit here and laugh.
Call me flaimbait if you want to, but here is my take on this...
MS Office is The Standard for office applications. Period. OpenOffice does not have interoperability at 100%. Therefore, I can't use it in the office. The company I work for (which shall remain nameless here) sends and recieves email attachments which are
They (much to my chagrin) are starting to use Access, and the quote from another IT person (a coder) in the company was "It is supported, and it will be around in 10 years"
I use linux, MacOS X.1, and Windows at home, and frankly, Linux isn't ready for prime time as a desktop OS. Not having an office suite which is 100% compatible with MS office is a MAJOR flaw holding back Linux from reaching major desktop support. Hopefully, MSFT will have to realease their desktop file protocol after this Antitrust thing is all said and done. That will do more than put a large damper on their monopoly.
I work as a network analyst, so I am not a programmer, but I have no qualms at using a command line. I have had to type in all kinds of stuff to make my linux machine actually work, and I still am not running as well as I should be because of AGP and sound problems. I was setting up this machine to try and convince the company to start propogating to Linux to save distro costs. Linux a(for the record: Mandrake 8.1 Soyo K7 Dragon board 1.4 ghz athlon, 512 DDR, Ati Radeon 32 DDR)
MacOSX actually has made a *nix easy enough for common people to use, and Office OSX is very very smooth.. It does have issues (such as MSFT's draconian licence (same as in Windows XP) so I refuse to use it, or purchase it. So I am stuck with a windows2k box with office2k at work. I would use an older version of office on a mac, but there are too many software apps that I can't get on Linux or Mac (i.e. some proprietery apps, PBX admin software, Fax server admin software, print server admin software, etc, etc.)
Linux needs a 100% MS compatible office suite, and because the desktop file protocol that they use is not opened, no linux office ap will be able to give me 100% file interoperablity, and therefore I can't use it most of the time. Free as in speech and beer is really really nice, but the world that I live in needs simple things too, and 100% office compatibility is one of them. MSFT knows this, which is why they only release older versions of their desktop file protocols, and won't release new ones until they themselves are old.
Blah Blah Blah.
We've all seen how MS's buisness and development plans work, and we dont need them pinching into the *nix market. After all MS Office is not even very good (In ways of eficiency atleast) and the only reason its popular is because its become an industry standard out of sheer marketing. What we do need though, in my opinion, is for more of our local speedy, quality applications to support MS office formats. (Abiword writing ms .docs would be a good deal, and KOffice would be good too). I think we could do more with opensource applications that we build to cover these formats. I know the .doc format is not very good, I'm sure abiword's document format as well as many others are superior for thier own reasons. But this doesn't help us at all when it comes to penitrating the office market.
In my mind and experiances the opensource community's goal as of late has been to build a quality stable and fast workstation enviroment. After all we already have, have had and will continue to have the best of the server market. Apache, thttpd, php, mysql, all by far outperform IIS, Asp and Access for a server application in resource handling, efficency and stability, and I would even venture as far as to say that opensource applications have become the industry standard for the server side market. But we need to be able to communicate with buisness colleages cleanly, in order to do anything with an office suite. This means MS document formats as they have been the rule of thumb as to what to use for the past decade.
All personal preferences of bloat, security, blah blah blah aside, I believe the primary reason that MS isn't very interested in MSOffice on the Linux desktop is because of product licensing control.
It's far too easy (in MS's view) for software to be copied under Linux. As a class of users, Apple users tend to be "more honest" about paying for their software. Windows users are questions in a non-business environment (heh, but a number of businesses also, really). But with XP, there will be more control over product licensing.
With Linux, they lose all this, or it becomes far harder to maintain. Also consider this issue: Cost of support for MS. With all the different distros available, I tend to think they mind find the cost of support under Linux as not yet being tolerable.
Linux has it's own version of "DLL Hell" in the libraries. With a MS product, it's *generally* pretty safe to force an upgrade of a MS DLL with a new MS DLL. But what about libraries they have no control over? The only way around that is to replicate the seemingly near 500MB of libraries. And then people complain about bloat!
I'm no big MS business model fan, but I find some of their products (Outlook not included) quite usable. I run Linux, OSX, Debian, FreeBSD, NT4, and Win2K here in my shop. I still use Windows/MSOffice for business work, because I have yet to find anything as good as MSOffice for Linux. Sad, but true, from MY perspective. Anyways, in some respects, they're in a lose-lose situation. They can't control the libraries, etc, and when they load their own, people will whine that it takes a full gig to install MSOffice. What's a company to do? Not bother, that's what.
--John
Read about it here.
Do those shots look like the X Window System to you? No? Maybe that's because Office X isn't written for the X Window System, but rather is a port of Microsoft's previous Mac OS codebase (dating back years) to updated Mac OS services and API's.
Furthermore, if Linux is the antichrist to Microsoft, why would they want to make their office suite available on it (or other similar free unix-like variant)? That would only provide more reason for people not to buy into Microsoft. (And look at how well commercial Linux office suites *cough Corel Office cough* have sold in the past.)
-benmyselfmusic
Clearly Linux and Unix don't have a large market share to justify porting Office (think about it in terms of how many sales MS would make). If Linux did have a large enough market share (which at that point would probably imply it's own office-type applications had already become competitive anyway) Microsoft probably would port it. If they smelled profit, they would be there is force... MS-Office was ported to the Mac long before MS invested in Apple.
We have a roughly-Cocoa-compatible framework that does indeed run under Linux. It is called GNUstep.
why would I want to lock my documents up in the MS path, they are abviously in the business of trying to CONTROL what I do with them and how.
I guess, if you absolutely need Office(TM) in your office, then go and install a TS or Citrix-Box and use rdpclient or ica-client to access it.
For everybody else, StarOffice is just enough.
I don't think a significant number of people would buy it - Microsoft doesn't either, and it would hurt their OS-business anyway.
So, unless a significant number of (home and corporate) desktops (>5 %) change OS in the near
future, there's no point in even thinking about it.
It even makes sense, from a business point of view (economies of scale etc.), I just don't like Windows or the way it works.
If I had the cash, I'd buy a MAC !
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Oh come on! What does Office have to do with security on a Unix box? For once, you'd think that could be left out of the summary. Office is really good at just about everything it does (except backwards-compatibility) while Windows leaves a bit to be desired. So I'd say yeah, Unix does need Office.
Linux/BSD's security track record is no better than Microsoft's. The things we have going for us:
- source code, so we can spot and fix bugs faster
- non-homogeniety (I didn't worry much about the overflows in PINE, since with all the jillions of architectures and versions it was extremely unlikely that someone would create an exploit or worm specifically for my version and machine.)
But we all have the same factors working against us:
- Writing software in inappropriately low-level languages (C/C++), where security holes are possible because the language makes it easy for programmers to make mistakes which can lead to exploits
- Writing software in or supporting scripting languages (perl, VBS) which make it easy to write broken CGI/etc. scripts on unix or easy to write worms on Windows. (Actually, now that perl is standard-issue on unix systems, it would seem that a cross-platform scripted worm would be relatively simple to pull off.)
- Ad-hoc (if even) code-review procedures. My favorite example is the MD5 Crypt code in PAM (a very important module for security!!) -- it's clear to me that nobody ever read this code before making it standard. Take a look.
I know this is not completely on the topic but it hits around it.
... it just works. It's going to be an even greater world when it happens too. I hope it is soon.
Other comments in this thread have mentioned that the OSX GUI isn't X. That Microsoft used a subset of the MAC GUI to port Office to OSX. I'm sure that required a bit of work and not a little expenditure of capitol.
Now, as I said before, I can see a day when Microsoft helps write WINE. As you can plainly see, WINE potentially can help Microsoft programs run on many platforms without the need for extensive porting. It's a win for Microsoft isn't it? Well, it will be when they finally realize that there is a viable market in Non-Microsoft OS's.
I see software development happening at the speed of hardware development. I see people buying software and it just runs - no matter what brand of computer you own. I hear old folks talking about windows and their children think they mean the holes in the walls that you look out of. I hear old folks talking about operating systems and their children thinking - what is an operating system?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
"Does Unix really need Office at this point?"
'Need' is asking the question point blank. Rather, ask a question like 'Would Office for *nix be a GOOD THING?'
Yes it would be a GOOD THING.
Stop trolling.
-Shaunak.
I noted that the article made the leap from saying "Office Suite for UNIX" to saying "for Linux"; let's try to keep things objective, and while we're encouraging Microsoft to make an Office suite for us, let's also encourage them to make it portable!
Brad
If wishes were fishes, perhaps a question to ask is why doesn't Apple port AQUA and the rest of the GUI layer to linux?
nothing is real
MS has a port to UNIX of IE - http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/ [microsoft.com]
;)
unfortunately, it's only for Solaris and HP-UX
Yeah I remember about that now. But the big question is, why not a Linux compatible version of Office? (and why not IE too?)
I took a look at your link and found the Unix IE system requirements.
Ouch!
IE 5 for Solaris - 68 MB hard drive space, 32 MB (64 recommended) of RAM
IE for HP-UX - 87 MB hard drive space, 64 MB (96 recommended) of RAM
Solaris IE 5 SP1 - 110 MB hard drive space, 64 MB (96 recommended) of RAM
HP-UX IE 5 SP1 - 120 MB of hard drive space, 64 MB (96...) or RAM.
Wow these requirements are higher than IE 5.5 for Windows! I dunno if I would trust MS writing Unix applications now. From the looks of it, it looks bizzarly bloated, and after a recent linux bloat discussion, I don't think MS Unix ports will be in our best interests
i absolutely had to comment on this. earlier today, i finished the ultimate bullshiting of the system. can we say "wine --winver=win2k ./officesetup.exe"? oh bullshit is bliss!
The dog got loose on my computer, and now there's XP all over the screen. -Paul www.ploeb.net
As has been repeated many times here, what Unix really needs is:
...), Microsoft would have to cooperate in the construction of this program in some way.
1] A standard for office file formats
2] A capable standalone import/export program between this format and MS office formats.
The OpenOffice file format looks pretty good to me, but I understand why there could be reluctance among the many other office projects to ditch their ideas (though I think they should anyway).
Having the conversion program be standalone would allow all competing interfaces to the standard file to coexist nicely with each other. My fantasy is that in the final settlement with somebody (US states, EU,
Dara
My Slackware box isn't the least bit bloated. Maybe if you're running Red Hat or Mandrake, Linux could seem a bit more bloated.
Pray tell how a UNIX port would give you LESS freedom?
Because Office docs would become a de-facto UNIX standard, just as they are in the Windows world. Thus, more UNIX users would need to rely on MS software.
Who'd bother to hack a hack?
Anybody who wants to get the software for free. (a.k.a. just about every user on slashdot)
-Uncle
There's a very good reason Microsoft hasn't ported Office to Linux:
Linux users expect everything for free.
To be fair (ya, I know) to users of other platforms, Microsoft would have to charge the same amount for Linux Office as for Mac Office and Windows Office. Linux people think paying that much for software is a joke, and will refuse to buy it.
Plus, if you think Microsoft software is buggy under Windows, imagine how buggy it would be under a non-standardized OS that has 100s of flavours.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
1. OSX isn't a real UNIX.
/usr/ports, gcc, libc... what did you expect? OSX has Just Another UNIX Kernel. This shouldn't amaze you.
Actually, OSX's Darwin kernel is completely FreeBSD-compliant. We have shells,
2. Yeah, but it's some Mach stuff
Yeah, it once was, when it was called Openstep maybe. Since that time, the microkernel and microkernel server layers have bled together to become a monolithic kernel that happens to support Mach IPC.
3. Okay then smarty guy, What's the deal with MS Office
Mac OS X does not use the X Window System, or at least it doesn't ship with it. The display system that is Mac OS X's trademark, is PDF-based (not Display Postscript based like Openstep, and certainly not caveman bitmap based like X Window System). In the case of Mac OS X, there are two native graphical APIs: Carbon, which is a polished up version of Mac OS 9's API, and Cocoa, which is the old Openstep API, and more closely resembles (or is resembled by) Microsoft MFC. Neither of these really has much in common with X Window System at all.
FWIW, Macs did suck, and Mac OS 9 and older are the steaming piles that prove it. But after NeXT acquired Apple for a negative sum of cash some time ago, they put a great OS on the desktop, and it sucks less than most. Check it out.
No, *nix doesn't need microsoft office. think about what a resource hog office usually is under windows; would you want that running on a workstation or multiuser machine? (keeping in mind that not all *nix boxen are dedicated to one user's desk.)
besides... I think people underestimate the number of business people that use macs at work. I visit 10-15 different companies a day, and I'd say about half of the offices I'm in are populated with iMacs. I don't see many people using *nix, unless I'm at a research facility or technical section of some sort... and they usually have a windows machine or two around anyway.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
For free operating systems to make inroads anywhere other than fringe, dual-boot systems, Office is needed.
This is the same reason why HP Laser printers are so popular in the business world. When you hit PRINT and you have an HP 4500 Laserjet, you are damn sure it will print and look good. I don't trust my work to anything less.
The same reason applies to Office. When I have customers that send me data, and I send my suppliers/customers data, I need to know that they can open it no questions asked. Not "save as text" or "save as html". OPEN. Regardless. Unless I have that confidence, I will never EVER use StarOffice, KOffice, or anything else. It is more than just READING those formats, you must be able to WRITE them as well. And so far, Office is the only thing that does it.
Plus, I don't think that OSS Community is capable of duplicating Office in a stable environment. Look at mozilla, you have dozens of people coding useless features into Mozilla that did nothing but slow it down and add bugs. The same thing applies to the office clones. I see all these people submitting features and then losing interest and letting it fall into complete bugginess. They just don't have the drive and motivation to do it with efficiency, timeliness, and stability.
One of OS X's gifts to the world, however, is the end of the reign X Window on UNIX. The GUI environment under OS X is Aqua. Anyone writing for the Mac writes their GUI as an Aqua GUI (Java apps are Aqua). You cannot easily port an Aqua app to the X Window System.
The reason Microsoft won't port Office to Linux is the same reason Microsoft won't port Internet Explorer to Linux. Microsoft doesn't want to make Linux be a viable desktop platform.
If Linux had Internet Explorer (sorry but the current browser choices for Linux really do suck) and MS Office (which really is much better than star office) most businesses and many people would have no reason to use Windows anymore.
On all other fronts, Linux is easier to maintain and administer. The problem is it just doesn't run what people want. If it did, people would use it because it's more stable, easier to administer, and free.
As has been previously stated, the APIs (Carbon) used to build Office for OS X are only available under Mac OS. Therefore the mac port really provides no base for a port to other unices. libwine would be much more significant to a potential unix port (not that it will happen anytime soon) than the port to Mac OS X.
MS invested $150 million (a very small chunk) in Apple around 4 years ago, but has since sold all of its holdings (the anti-trust case being one reason for this action).
The real reason exists Office for the Mac OS? It's often cited as MS's 3rd most profitable product, which is undoubtedly why there is already an OS X version out.
Why not port it to other Unices (including Linux)? Office, as its name implies, is meant for workplace desktops -- a space where Unix isn't exactly prominent.
If OSS and Linux are so superior to the MS offerings we use, then why do you want to use our office suite? If we Windows users suck so bad, then why would you want to run our software?
If you want a full-featured Office suite, write your own.
Carbon Applications are every bit as Unix as Cocoa. Carbon is not some thin wrapper Apple devised to help developers port. In fact some aspects of Cocoa, under the OO level, are implemented using Carbon API calls.
I think this confusion is Apple's fault. They use terminology like a Terminal window "letting you talking directly to the Unix kernel". This is crap, the shell is just another program. They mystify Unix and make it sound harder than it really is.
In short, unless it is running in the classic environment (they all run as one application), it is a Unix Application.
There is a great deal of very widely used and powerful software out there that is not a Microsoft product, yet there is incessant chatter about when such-and-such MS app might be ported to Linux. Here's a hint: That's playing on microsoft's terms. If all O/S vendors depended solely on MS to supply useful applications to make their systems go they'd be in a world of hurt. Thankfully, there's Adobe, Oracle, Borland, BEA, Autodesk, Symantec, Intuit, and dozens of others that make quality business-critical applications. Linux fans would benefit themselves and the world much more by encourage those companies to support Linux, rather than perpetuating the MS software everywhere world.
.NET is a case in point -- what's the attraction of putting so much free effort into a system that is barely out of vaporware and tied to MS when there are existing software systems that do the same things, and have been doing them reliably for years on multiple platforms? The phenomenon is hard to fathom.
I think the recent attention given to portable
Staroffice...
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
This will probably be modded down to 1, but here goes:
For political reasons, it's obvious why MS would never port Office to Linux; we might as well be arguing for cars that run on water from an oil company. It would be much more likely that they would make a port to a UNIX instead. Decidedly, even this possibility is remote since even the largest *NIXes (FreeBSD, Solaris, etc) neither are in the habit of being used in environments where Office is needed nor do they have enough market share to financially justify porting.
The only way Office (and therefore desktop viability) will ever come to Linux is if MS is broken up - a virtual impossibility now - or somehow forced by the courts to release their code: and only the latter by enough of us writing in and expressing our concerns on the case. If you ever want to have the option to use Office on Linux, don't just complain, write.
"Does Unix really need Office at this point?"
Isn't that why we have StarOffice?
Posting anonymously because of NDA/SPA/DMCA/whatever...
Microsoft has already ported everything from Internet Explorer to Windows Media Player to Microsoft Office. Only IE and WMP were ever made available to the public (for obvious reasons). These ports were done with the Mainwin kit from Mainsoft. Mainwin is similar to Winelib except that it uses real Microsoft source code (including all secret API's, also explains why IE and WMP are so bloated on UNIX) and runs on more platforms (Linux, SunOS, HP/UX, AIX, IRIX, Tru64).
Not if it's backers are really happy with that 0.24% marketshare it's got. Of course, that 0.24% marketshare is the real reason why it makes no business sense for Microsoft to port it, not the paranoid persecution fantasy dreamed up by Slashdotters.
because Quartz isnt even remotely related to X11, so the port from quartz to x11 shloudnt trivial...
Beside with a market of 95% of all computers (wintel & Apple) (out of the hat figure), why bother with a few more units.
1. There's suitable demand for it.
2. It's profitable.
I'm no expert, but I don't think there's much demand for Office for *nix. And even if there was, it wouldn't be profitable like Office for mac due to way less market share.
"Technically, this begins to seem a little bit like using one's market share in the applications business to protect one's market share in the OS business, which would, on the face of it, seem to be an anti-trust no-no."
No shit.. everyone knows that. It's not necessarily illegal, though. The courts have been over this. You cannot *force* them to develop their product for another platform....at least, the courts have not chosen to try to do so.
Where is the financial sense for microsoft to put money towards developing office for unix? There isn't one.
I've completely converted from Win2k+IE6+Office+Outlook+AIM to RedHat7.2+Opera6+StarOffice6+Evolution1+Gaim and love it. No loss of functionality, less BSOD/strange hangs. And my mail filtering finally works.
There is no need for Office under Un*x.
The original poster, technode, seems to have the same assumption that most of the slashdot readership tends to, which is that there isn't any reason that Linux shouldn't be a desktop OS. I disagree with that.
Linux is a Unix clone, right? At this point, I don't think anyone disputes that Unix is a server OS, not a desktop OS. It does a great job at doing all those complicated server things (too many to enumerate here).
In big business, in America, Linux has done best as a server OS. OEM vendors who sell machines with Linux preinstalled do so with their server lineup. For example, IBM.
I'm a firm believer in using the right tool for the job. As such, it makes perfect sense to me that video production houses use Avids instead of IBM Thinkpads. And that most businesses put Windows or Macs on the desktop and Unix (or some kind of server OS) in the air conditioned rooms.
My point is simply that Linux excels at being a really fast, stable server OS. Benchmarks have shown over and over that it can do it faster than a Windows server. Why would you need an office productivity suite on your server?
(If I don't instantly get modded down to -1 Troll, please try to reply in a polite fashion. I'm more likely to read and reply if you leave out comments about my mother.)
Other comments in this thread have mentioned that the OSX GUI isn't X. That Microsoft used a subset of the MAC GUI to port Office to OSX. I'm sure that required a bit of work and not a little expenditure of capitol.
Mac OS X has three environments under which programs can be developed. The first is Classic, which is just the legacy Mac OS. The other two, Carbon and Cocoa, both enable programs to run in Mac OS X without having to run Classic. If you want to get technical, there is also the BSD layer, but that's not really Mac OS programming. This is why many unix/linux programs can be easily ported to the Mac.
MS Office X is a Carbon application. This means that they partially rewrote the application to comply with the Carbon APIs, rather than the Classic APIs. In comparison to what it would take to rewrite Office in Cocoa, this is no effort at all. Apple claims that converting an application from Classic to Carbon requires changing less than 10% of the code, depending on how 'correctly' the application was written.
Cocoa is an entirely different API that shares nothing with the Classic environment. "Converting" to a Cocoa application isn't possible - the app must be rewritten from scratch. On the other hand, Cocoa is a fully object-oriented API based on NeXT's tech.
So the point of this whole thing is that MS would not have had to write or port any GUI code except what they themselves wrote (MS is notorious for not always sticking to the standard GUI widgets). Since they already had MS Office 2001, a Classic application, they only needed to change that 10% of their code to make it a Carbon app. Of course, they changed/added features, as well...
Mr. Sharumpe
-- The above comments are just my opinion. If you are going to flame me, save your time. I am fireproof.
..the answer to which is "economics", of course. Quit kidding yourselves.
It's really not as easy as you make it seem. Mac OS X has standards it has it's own standard widget set and there are UI guidelines. Linux, desktop wise has absolutely NONE of that, do you port for GTK or QT or do you just go native? Obviously biasing AND binding yourself to one of the three. Not to mention not using GTK/QT will make your porting efforts extremely more intensive unless you write your own tk or wrapper and for all that "getting-raw" looks ugly. Then you have problems of porting over systems that Mac's and Windows have had for quite sometime. Need a new font in Linux?? Download the ttf or bitmap font install it into your fontdir, recreate fonts.dir, restart xfs if you use it or whatever fontserver you are using just to get fonts working (whether it be an X module or xfs or whatever else exists). It's not a pain for someone like me or you but the subsystem just isn't there to make a feasible port for the dumb user.
Printing as well in Windows and or Mac you "clickety-click" add printer or whatever it is, add a driver, reboot, and you're done. The subsystems just aren't there right now for a properly functioning office suite.
I don't want some super office suite on my system to begin with, Abiword works fine and is light, unlike others in different fields I don't have to write large amounts of papers on the discovery of a new virus that bonds itself to itself for protection and replication using the raped cells as defense as it mutates a single cell into an absolute killer.
I'm sure they don't want some lightweight office system that doesn't have all those little plugins that MS Office does. I don't know most people that use Linux that would actually bother purchasing Office when Abiword, OpenOffice, StarOffice etc do basically the same thing for a computer programmer; allow us to read word documents.
If you want Office for Unix, you got it.. get a mac for your secretary or whatever.
yeah, right. try porting a nextstep or openstep app to cocoa. then try porting a cocoa app to gnustep. then we may talk. don/t tell me "others have done it". YOU DO IT then tell me how hard it is. moron.
It's an interesting thought to have MS Office ported to other platforms (Linux, *BSD, etc.). But, it is up to Microsoft what platforms they want Office to run on. Thankfully.
/.). That is a good thing.
First, it's their product. Not mine, not yours, not . They can do what they want to with their product (freedom is sort of an ambigious term here on
Second, does Unix really need Office? Probably not. I don't think a Unix Office Suite is going to convince Mom and Dad to go purchase a Sun workstation or install FreeBSD on their latest Intel box. Moreover, businesses certainly would not rush to replace their wintel systems just because Office is suddenly available for Unix.
Lastly, who really cares? Unless you NEED office, what's the point? StarOffice works fine for most office funtionality. I say let things happen naturally.
Honesltly, I think Mac OSX is going to be huge. It's the first time in my computing career I have actually considered purchasing a mac. I like the architecture but the old Mac OS's turned me off completely. I played with OS X for a little while last week. While I still don't like the GUI, the functionality and performance definitely caught my attention. Now I have to consider another platform for my little world here.
Just my rant for the day.
I know it's offtopic, since Office X is Carbon... But the Cocoa APIs are just a _slight_ extension of the OpenStep APIs, which are almost entirely useable on any OS via GNUstep. So really, only Carbon isn't easily portable.
In the near future, we will see many, many more 'main stream' applications such as Adobe's prestigious family of design applications, Macromedia's design, multimedia and production applications, etc. running 'natively' on OS X. Don't look for any of these applications to be ported to UNIX. Developing for OS X is absolutely nothing like developing for UNIX, take it from a developer.
For example, a carbon applications is still based on the same MacOS APIs that have existed in the past - with a few omissions and a few additions, of course. The point of Carbon, though, is to make porting existing MacOS applications as easy as possible. Cocoa, on the other hand, is very different and is a totally new creature, and one that is proprietary, I'm afraid. I don't think we will see a Cocoa compatability layer for Linux - ever. These OS X applications are not based on the FreeBSD/OpenBSD foundation of OS X, it is the OS itself that is based on these foundations, not the applications that run on top of the OS.
A valid analogy might be the fact that in a large part, Windows NT was initially based in a large part on VMS, if I recall - maybe not the actual code, but I have heard varying reports of that as well. Of course, no application that runs on NT will run on VMS (without significant recoding). This is because the foundation of these OS's is less important than the APIs they are written against.
Bottom line here is that OS X is far more than a foundation of FreeBSD/OpenBSD with a pretty window manager. For more info, check out Apple's site for developers: click here. You'll find info on Darwin (the FreeBSD/OpenBSD layer), Cocoa, Carbon, how the various layers interact, what depends on what, etc. Enjoy!
Friggin dolts... write some story up there asking if/when Office comes to OSX. Goto Microsoft.com/mac or just visit apple.com/macosx. Absolute shit in terms of asking an intelegent question.
Biggest negative - I paid for it and I can't register it because I would have to get a Passport
Just outta curiosity, why do you want to register it? Is it forced?[1]
I've never felt the need to voluntarily submit my contact info[2] to some corporation - I paid for the software, it's a done deal.
After all, it's not like the software has a warranty.
C-X C-S
[1] Even if it is, there's most likely a crack.
[2] Data which will probably eventually end up on some spammer or junkmailer's list...
Imagine, a standard office file format. Then applications could compete in terms of interface, usability and functionality. Then again I'm just being silly.
ClamBoy (who's too lazy to make an account)
and all the bugs associated with it.
Ex: In Word for Office v. X (aweful name btw.)
-Type a letter (long painful task),
- Save your new document.
-Type a name for your new document. You are on OS X so no problem about file names greater than 31 chars so you type a very long descriptive name
- You save.
- BING! Error message after the save window has disappeared. "can't use more that 31 chars."
Repeat in Excel, rinse in PowerPoint, get the same error in Internet explorer with file truncation when downloading from the Web and you finally get the idea that what's living under this crap is not Unix (like GNU) and has been around for more than 2 years.
M$ QA: which QA?!?
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Microsoft started out, in a large way, by selling Apple software. Excel, for example, started as a Mac program. This is a port of their old Office for Mac stuff, it's not a ground up re-write for UNIX. It just runs in what is really a MacOS emulator for UNIX; aka Carbon. Which makes me wonder if Apple should try porting the Carbon environment to other UNIXES... Boy, you want to see a monopoly in action? Look at Apple. They don't make any money, though, so the DOJ doesn't bother with them. How would you like it if Microsoft told you that you could only run Windows 2002 on a Microsoft M5 Series Computer? You'd hate it, right? But if Apple does it, it's ok, because then you get better hardware compatibility! And colours! Ooooh!
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Microsoft's refusal to release a version of Office (or Internet Explorer or Outlook) for Linux has nothing to do with technical difficulty. Microsoft views Linux as a threat. Linux is typically run on the same platforms targeted by Microsoft's Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP operating systems. Apple is just Microsoft's token competition and, when it looked like Apple was going to die, it was Microsoft that gave them a big cash infusion to keep them on life support.
The biggest reason that Linux has not been widely adapted by business is that it does not run Office. Microsoft's stranglehold on businesses isn't Windows. It's Office -- and Office sells Windows, not vice-versa. If the average business could equip employees with Linux rather than Windows, many would do so for the cost savings, but the lack of Office for Linux presents too big a hurdle for most businesses. Microsoft loves the fact that StarOffice, 602 PC Suite, and the other alterna-Offices are, at best, only partially compatible. If they start to get too close, Microsoft just starts morphing the Office file formats.
If Microsoft had been broken up into an applications company and an operating systems company, the applications company would probably be working on a version of Office for Linux as I write this. But since they are all under the same corporate umbrella, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have simply issued an edict prohibiting the release of Linux software, whether free, like I.E., or for purchase, like Office. You can get Internet Explorer 5.01 for HP-UX and Solaris, so it's clear that the lack of a Linux version is not due to a technical inability to produce one.
If you use MS apps on Linux/Unix, you're still using MS apps. You're still voting for MS with dollars. You're still endorsing MS 'extended' protocols and closed file formats.
To me, it's a non-starter. Better to have native apps that can import the files - atleast until MS uses DMCA or UCITA or some other vile thing to make that impossible, too.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I suspect Microsoft probably just doesn't see any value in this. Right now, they likely perceive the market as small. And if the market ever got big, that would just mean that their desktop monopoly was threatened. What possible reason would they have to port?
And, frankly, do we really want it? MS Office on Linux would completely wipe out all the other efforts. Sure, Linux would get more commercial users, but they would all be just as tied to Microsoft as they are now. I'd rather see less adoption of Linux and more open source efforts.
which would, on the face of it, seem to be an anti-trust no-no.
The only thing I can't understand is why this surprises you.
This has been the Microsoft way for quite some time now. The only time Microsoft does anything good for anyone else is when Microsoft will benefit from it themselves, or if the backlash from paying customers would be too extreme.
I'd personally love to see MS-Office-2000-i386.rpm for the Linux install on my laptop, but I'm realistic enough that I know it's probably never going to happen.
Even if the court ordered it as part of the settlement, I think they'd find some way to weasel out of it.
Most UNIX-like systems use an X11 server to draw graphics on the screen. MacOS X does not use X11; instead it uses Quartz, a Display PDF server, derived from NeXT's Display PostScript server. (The GNUstep project is working on a DPS/Quartz server running on top of X11.)
X11 and Quartz only provide basic drawing capabilities. They don't provide widgets such as menus, toolbars, scrollbars, etc. So a widget toolkit API is layered on top of the drawing functionality. In X11, common widget sets are KDE/Qt, GNOME/GTK, and Xt/Motif. Most of these APIs try to shield the programmer from having to access any of the low-level rendering calls. There are versions of Qt that can run without X11 -- the front end and back end are completely de-coupled.
MacOS X provides 2 different APIs for GUIs: Carbon and Cocoa. Cocoa is basically the NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP API adapted for use within MacOS. It contains most of the old NeXT stuff, plus some functionality from MacOS 9. It is accessed via Objective-C. (The GNUstep folks are attempting to emulate most of Cocoa.) Carbon is basically the old MacOS 9 API in C adapted to use Quartz and the other lower-level functionality of MacOS X.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
1. I use Linux on my laptop as my primary desktop. I run SO 6 beta and have absolutely no problems exchanging files with others in the publishing biz using Word on Mac and Win9x.
2. Why do we need IE on Linux? Galeon is by far the best revision of a browser I've seen on Linux as far as rendering and functionality goes. The only problems I've had thus far is when trying to access a site that requires Netscape or IE and does a JS check to insure browser type. That's poor coding and has nothing to do with the functionality of Galeon.
The whole idea behind open source isn't that it's free - although in most cases it is and that's a nice fringe benefit - the idea is that if YOU don't like what you have or have a good idea that you can extend and improve upon what's out there and give back to the community.
If SO or Galeon/Opera/Mozilla aren't what you want, code up what you do want - or make suggestions to the guys writing it. They're more likely to take your opinion into consideration than the guys at MS.
And lastly, I don't want to see MS products on Linux. Bloated, insecure applications with "technical support" backdoor trojans are not what I want out of an OS. If I want MS to know what hardware/software I'm running I'll write them a freaking letter and tell them. Otherwise, it's none of their damn business. Tell that to Dell and MS, who by default install 3 different accounts on XP machines for "technical support" remote access. Or how about the scripts in ME that run periodically to ship an XML document off to Microsoft detailing the hardware/software on your PC.
Is this the kind of crap you want on your Linux? I don't.
-----
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
The question of porting a non-unix MacOS X application to Linux makes me wonder what the current state of MacOS emulation under Linux is. I see that Basilisk is apparently a GPL'ed 68k Mac emulator under relatively active development, and that the proprietary executor is still available, along with Carbonless Copies from the same company. Also, a couple of others are discussed on emulators.com.
who in the fud needs that virotic invasion of privacy payper liesense bugwear crud on their linux box? that's 2 storIEs touting the 'products' of the felonious kingdumb so far today. like giving john gotti full page ads in the NYT. maybe we'll hear about VA larry going m$bugwear next? after all IT's ALL about a few billybuks, write?
happy happy gnu year/millennium from all of us to all of you.
First, there's the XonX project, where they've developed a way to run rootless XFree86. It's kind of a pain to get working, so you need:
XDarwin, which is a nice way to get XFree86 windows run next to MacOSX's Aqua windows. However, even this has its faults, so I highly recommend:
OroborOSX, which is an X11 window manager/environment. I've been running 0.75a3 and a4 for a little while now, and it's pretty good. I haven't successfully compiled any X applications for it, but I haven't had much time over Christmas break to work seriously on it.
If you're looking for UNIX software to run on Mac OS X, try Fink, which aims to port all sorts of UNIX software to OS X. There's also the GNU Mac OS X Public Archive, which I only just found, and some Mac OS X ports on Forked.net, which I used to solve some initial XDarwin issues I was having.
Anyway, Microsoft wouldn't be able to port Office for OS X to UNIX very easily, we can move UNIX software (and even X11 software) to Mac OS X without too much difficulty.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Considering Microsoft owns Mainsoft (http://www.mainsoft.com/)which has ported part if the Win32 API to Unix. That is why we have IE for Solaris http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp)
and Windows Media Player for Solaris. So instead of porting OSX office, they could port the latest Win32 version of office.
Hahahahahahaha....oh yeah, that doesn't work, huh? They can do whatever they want..
Seriously, I doubt there would be a Mac verion at all if MS hadn't settled a big list of lawsuits by agreeing to produce office for a set number of years.
I agree. A standard office format would be great. We *nix folk don't really want to use MS Office. But, we need to share files with those that do use it. I was thinking about something simular to what you suggested. How about in the final settlement requiring Microsoft to publish the file formats they use. And, also require them to publish new formats developed in the future. That way the other Office developers can write better filters.
To run Office on a Linux system (or *BSD, or Sun), you'd have to basically reverse-engineer EVERYTHING about Microsoft office. This is because it is not Posix, and not written to use any sort of X system. As said before, all the calls that would be made to the Mac API.
SIG: HUP
I've already started using StarOffice in Windows even though I have access to Office XP. The deal with my IT department is that I can use StarOffice but they won't support it and I have to use MS-Office if any compatibility issues arise. So far so good.
My problem now is that I don't want to use Office on my iBook at home, either. I've been making do with AppleWorks, but it's just not the same. I don't care when Office is being ported to Unix; I do care when Office alternatives will be ported to OSX. Hell, I'd *pay* for them.
> Does Unix really need Office at this point?
This is a much more interesting and multi-layered question than most people think. Linux doesn't need MS Office from the perspective of a productivity suite. However, from a marketing and "perception" point-of-view I don't know if it wouldn't be a bad thing. The perception is that unless it runs MS Word/PowerPoint/Excell it isn't useful. Yes, we all know that the existing Linux office suites can read/write MS Office files just fine. But "normal" people don't want to know from file formats. They want to ruun the app.
The funny thing is that if MS did port Office over to Linux it would do two things; it would increase their market share on Office, however, it would make a tremendous dent in their desktop OS market share.
Porting MS Office to Linux would only be a good thing for Linux. From a "perspective" perspective, that is.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I find it interesting that while the Microsoft/Netscape wars started because Netscape (and others) claimed Microsoft was using it's monopoly in the OS market to take over the browser market (by packaging IE with Windoze), people are now complaining that MS is using it's monopoly in the application market to protect it's OS business; the exact opposite of Netscape's gripe.
This leads to two possibilities, either Microsoft is losing the OS wars and trying to fight back with applications, or Microsoft has a monopoly in more than one area. I wonder which is true?
I'm astonished no one has mentioned this.
MS has no need of emulators like Wine. MS, I believe, actually owns MainSoft, and in any case, has allowed them to port Win32, COM MSXML, and a boatload of other junk to SysV Unix and Linux.
If MS doesn't release applications under Linux, it's because they don't want to.
Matt
sum of us, will be thrilled to wait for the GNU version to come out, at a cost of: free, as in download.
While Carbon is a set of libaries that were created to allow easier transitions of Classic apps into OS X, not all carbon apps can be run in Classic. In fact the more stable OS X applications tend to be ones that give up running in OS 9, especially when they are the size of Eudora and larger.
Microsoft Office for Mac OS X IS already available. It is a native version, written using the Cocoa libraries to take advantage of some of the features of the Aqua interface - e.g. transparency in graphs. They haven't just mapped APIs - it is a full and well implemented re-write that really outshines the Windows version of Office.
As said in the post it would be very tricky to port this to other UNIX systems running X11 - I suspect it would almost be a complete rewrite again.
MacOS X owes a little more to FreeBSD than it does to NetBSD, and is based around the Mach kernel.
Were none of the facts checked before the article posted?
I would rather see no new stories on the weekends instead of the stupid stuff that does get posted. Who really cares about Katz's movie reviews or stories like this one? The poster even made the mistake of basically saying that X windows is included by defualt in OS X. Besides do we even need/want office? I once was naive enough to think we did- but I realize we are better without them. There are a few open source office projects out there and I think they represent our future. ABIword is a very nice light word processer given it is limited in some ways, no tables, but it can only get better. I can understand why people want a office suite but that does have to translate to MS Office.
Just wondering, how closely related are the windows and mac code bases of office? I have heard rumors/reports that the IE code base are similar in name only. In any case a the mac port of Office would still have to be ported and just re-compiled.
im sure may would agree... microsoft making programs for linux. that would be a disaster. even if its only offcie.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
If MS released Office for Linux then I can guarantee that users wouldn't buy it anyways. Sure you might have a few people pay for it, but most will not. Look at Netscape/iPlanet (not the web browser). There was so much customer demand for Linux versions of their software, such as Enterprise server, Messenging, Directory, etc. that Netscape decided to start porting their servers to Linux. Suddenly the Linux versions became their most popular downloads. Later when an audit was done it was found that everyone was downloading the Linux versions for free, but nobody was paying for it. It was all the Linux users at home downloading it for their personal use or to run it for free and not corporations trying to purchase it (lab environments excluded). Hence the reason why Netscape/iPlanet have been dropping the Linux versions of their products now. There is demand for the product, but there is noone that will pay for it. Linux users typically want something for free and the source code to go with it. How many times does a commercial company release a product for Linux only for the Linux community to keep bothering the company saying "where's the source code???". If MS released a Linux version then it would appear on every warez site with cracks to break any protection. The same thing may exist for Windows or Mac versions, however the percentage of people who use it illegally is very small. Since Linux isn't as wide spread and it's typically techies that run it, and these are the ones that typically also pirate software (how many Slashdot posts are in here justifying cracking, reverse engineering, stealing intellectual property, etc... way, way too many...), these folks will not pay for it regardless of the price, hence there will be a much higher percentage of pirating in the Linux community than Windows/Mac. I can't see MS releasing a version of Office for Linux anytime soon. Maybe if it had the same or higher office/home desktop market as Apple did they might, but for now I would be shocked if they did.
Microsoft really would be doing a disservice to it's shareholders to release Office for Linux if there's no profit to be gained. Remember the stupid web count? 0.24% was Linux desktop share, Hitbox or something. Even using a Mac website, it's 1.5% Regardless, it seems to be lower than Mac marketshare, which is roughly between 3% and 5%
Still, for the naysayers, here's the counter-arguments:
Unix programs exist, like Maya!
Except that Maya is expensive and specialized. Unless the average Linux person is willing to pay $1k for Office, at which point they should just buy a 500MHz iBook and Office and go impress the chicas.
Unix commodity programs exist, like FrameMaker!
That's hardly commodity, and it's hardly cheap. Sure it's Adobe, but FrameMaker is for library and content creation and management, hardly for consumer and consumable use, like Office. So, again, get the iBook (only $894!) and Office.
ID software ports Quake to Linux!
They do so out of charity and principle. I don't expect they make much money out of it, and it guarantees them a non Microsoft OS for sanity checking and portability; it's legitamately an exercise of goodwill and discipline for them. Do you expect Microsoft to perform the same?
I can't believe I had to browse at the anonomyous area to find here to find someone who mentioned marketshare!
GPL Deconstructed
Oh, I forgot to mention one thing. I love to suck cock. Reply if you want a blowjob.
ClamBoy (who's too lazy to make an account)
But you managed to be wrong on every point.
Is it an Application? Yes.
Does it run native on MacOSX? Yes.
well, almost.
On that you are absolutely right.
Is MacOSX a Unix OS? Yes.
Somewhat.
MacOSX is based on a BSD/Mach Kernel. But that doesnt make it Unix. The Unix compatibility is more of a one-way street than anything else. Lemme hit a few more of your points, and I'll explain:
Carbon Applications are every bit as Unix as Cocoa.
True, but not in the way you meant. Cocoa has _NOTHING_ to do with Unix, and neither does carbon.
Carbon is not some thin wrapper Apple devised to help developers port.
somewhat true. Carbon is almost the entire MacOS toolbox, as its been since the begining. Apple took the existing toolbox, weeded out the APIs that wouldnt work under OSX (the ones with direct hardware access, for example) and added a few new oens, and called that carbon. Its a completely integrated API set for MacOSX, not just a wrapper.
This aided in porting current applications to MAcOSX without having to do a major re-write.
In fact some aspects of Cocoa, under the OO level, are implemented using Carbon API calls.
wrong. Cocoa was pretty much done LONG before the idea of carbon came around. originally, there was going to be a "classic" compatibility layer, much like there is now, and then from there developers would have to completrely re-write their applications in objective-c or java for cocoa (yellow box, as it was known then). After much developer discontent, they decided to add carbon, which sits NEXT to cocoa, not underneath it. In fact, with MacOSX server 1, there was no carbon compatibility layer, or a classic layer for that matter. just BSD and yellow-box.
They use terminology like a Terminal window "letting you talking directly to the Unix kernel". This is crap, the shell is just another program. They mystify Unix and make it sound harder than it really is.
I agree, it could be taken as confusing. but with terminal programs, you can simply port most *nix applications and have them run in the terminal without a problem.
The problem only arises if you try to use a GUI, under which case you would have to use quartz...
which has _NOTHING_ to do with x11 or gnome or kde or anything like that.
In short, unless it is running in the classic environment (they all run as one application), it is a Unix Application.
BZZZZZZT.
nope.
its a Unix application as much as OfficeXP is a VAX/XMS application (NT having some of its roots in VMS, Win32 having its roots in NT)
Now, getting to what I was saying earlier, Unix compatibility ios a one-way street with MacOSX. it is based on a Mach/BSD kernel, and can run a good deal of bsd/unix programs with a simple re-compile or some minor code tweaking....
But theres a lot more to OSX then the BSD layer.
On top of that, is the Carbon and Cocoa APIs, which run on top of the BSD layer. THESE are what the native applications are written to, the higher-level APIs. and then there is the Quartz graphics layer, which is the GUI for OSX.
Any Native MacOSX application, therefore, isnt written to the BSD layer, but to the cocoa and carbon layer that sits atop it.
Apple could port (with significant effort, no doubt) the upper layers of MacOSX to run on the NT kernel, but that wouldnt make the applications any more Win32 then it would make them BSD or VAX for that matter.
this is evolution, and its only working one way.
Humans arent gonna evolve into apes (although its arguable that a fair amount have the brain capacity of apes....), and in somewhat the same way, OSX applications arent gonna evolve into Unix applications.
they can be re-written, but not simply evolve into them.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
Come people, get it straight and honest:
:o) No (estimated) market -> No product.
How many Linux users would buy Micorosoft Office for Unix?
Heh? Would you? For me I can tell I would not, and guess thats the way of a huge percentage. And now for programming, all the beatiful idealism aside, when programming commercially you also have to bend to the market rules, altough we programmers generally hate that deeply
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
You are correct that ordinary users can install software in /Applications. Thanks for telling me that. You are also correct that Office keeps per user prefs in ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
OpenOffice for UNIX. Why not for OSX as well?
The porting must be signicantly different for OSX than for other unix-based platforms. Aqua is different from X11. The file system used in OSX
HFS+ is not case sensitive (yes I know one can install on uFS, but you'll be stuck when you need to update firmware..also no classic but who cares).
Personally I wish someone would port OpenOffice to OSX..then OpenOffice could become the standard office suite (UNIX, LINUX, Windows, and Mac versions..all free). Screw Microsoft!
I'm sick an tired of hearing about Office this and Office that. You'd think that people buy computers and then spend most of their time writing letters or creating spreadsheets. The fact is who really cares about Microsoft Office. If that is all you bought your computer for then you should have bought a typewriter. Your life would be much easier and you probably would have saved yourself at least a thousand dollars.
- Cocoa (Objective C)
- Carbon
- Java
- Classic (Mac OS 9 compatible apps)
- Support for all POSIX APIs
Microsoft Office v.X is built using Carbon. The Carbon API is essentially classic Mac OS C++ code updated to take advantage of the new OS X GUI toolbox, and to interact with the Mach microkernel. This allows Classic Mac OS applications to take advantage of SMP, etc, as well as other UNIX-esk benefits such as dynamic memory allocation, protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and other buzzword power.
Essentially Carbon is an API in and of itself, but still uses up to 95% of the Classic Mac OS code.
The Carbon API has been specifically designed for OS X and is not portable to other Unices, according to Apple, neither do they have any intention to attempt to do so.
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Using Carbon and Cocoa in the same application is as easy as:
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
#import <Carbon/Carbon.h>
Since Carbon is a C API and since ObjC is a superset of ANSI C, you can access all of Carbon from a Cocoa program.
It's plum ironic that you read all about Linux, BSD, Solaris, hacking, personal freedoms, and all other sorts of stuff on Slashdot, and yet no one ever seems to be able to get it right, or care to try very hard, when it comes to the Mac OS or Mac OS X. Even the initial post didn't seem to me to have looked very hard to see if there IS a Mac OS X version of Office.
I wrote the MacNN article which sparked this thread last year, and saw a complete and total lack of understanding in most of the following posts. The tone of the followups expressed a lack of understanding on Apple's part for using BSD and not Linux - that Apple is not savvy enough to be in business, etc. This thread has reinforced that most dotters don't really understand what Mac OS X IS.
-++-
Mac OS X is NOT Unix. Mac OS X is NOT *NIX, or Linux. The architecture of Mac OS X is focused on leveraging the Mach kernel to provide services, do VM, handle threads, and more. Then, the tools on top of that are crafted to the Mach kernel, such as all applications being a Mach thread, and networking through BSD sockets. There is no compatibility layer which speaks Mach, there is only Mach.
Perhaps the work to change this would not revolutionize the field of Computer Science, but there is no true reason for Apple to switch, and having application *NIX personalities is a feature almost no "Mac" user would ever care about.
Quartz is not X11. X11 is a protocol, Quartz is an API. The better analogy would be Quartz and KDE - both of which feed a display engine, and provide widgets and graphical tools. Without getting into a side by side comparison, which you choose is going to be a matter of choice as to which you like better.
But, Microsoft worked hard to leverage the Quartz API for many of the features in Office - graph generation being the primary target, so a good amount of work would have to be done to reengineer major parts of the display engine just to get around these sections.
Consider further, if you will, how hard it has proven to be for most programming firms to take a Win32 application to the Mac using the Mac Toolbox (aka Classic) or even Carbon, much less fine-tuning it's graphics for the platform. The more impressive quick translation applications for Mac OS X have been written in Cocoa, the framework that has evolved from the NextSTEP/OPENSTEP frameworks/APIs, and Cocoa isn't even close to being link Carbon.
With the Mac Office codebase written in Carbon/Classic, it would take quite a while for any porting to take place, and in such time, I am confidant a newer version of Office would have already been released...
-++-
I'm not saying Slashdot should become, overnight, more Mac OS X conscious, but really...no one would spare the whip on someone who said Linux and Windows were the same since they are both operating systems...
I looked through the posts, and no one seemed to provide a link to microsoft.com/mac/officex/. Office v.X looks much better than Office XP does. Multi-selection seems to be the coolest new feature in Word, and Quartz rendered charts is the coolest feature in Excel.
Office v.X uses the Mac Carbon API which allows applications to be easily ported to OS X from previous versions of the Mac OS while allowing it to take partial advantage of new OS X technologies such as Aqua and Quartz.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
We bought 2 copies of Office X for the 2 Powerbooks we have at work and while reading the description on the back of the box I found something funny.
.. i never thought Microsoft would tout Unix as stable on ANY of their products.
Office X brings you the power of Office, with the simplicity of the Mac on the stability of Unix.
Funny
The point here is that Office v. X is not written in Cocoa (the evolution of NeXT), it is written in Carbon (the reduced set of APIs that grew from the Mac OS Toolkit)
Therefore, any port of Office to any *nix would not have a head start in the form of BSD compatibility.
Actually, MS don't just make office for Mac to avoid the lawyers, they make it because it makes a heck of a lot of money for them (comparatively little pirating on Macintosh so software generates far more revenue for the size of the user base). Why would MS completely recode Office and spend time making it "Mac-like" if they were just trying to please the lawyers?
Most people don't realise this but as is continuously stressed at product demos, Office:Mac is not a port of Windows and is developed by a completely separate team that is free to implement whichever features they choose. Some code is shared between the team but the product is far from being a straight port and hasn't been since Word 6 turned out to be such a flop.
They are not going to make a Office suite for Linux because they don't right now and they don't feel they have too. If Linux only has 0.24% of the market its easy to economicaly justify that. Plus there are all the other reasons they will not....
Not porting Office to Linux isn't just justifiable, doing otherwise would be economic suicide. There are very few Linux users on the desktop, even fewer of them who really need Office (most Linux users hack code, Office may be used for documentation but business users will either standardise on some other format or provide a convienient Windows box, home users are unlikely to write documentation or would just use another format).
Then, after we've narrowed down the number of users this far, look at how many Linux users would like to pay $500 (estimated US price, I'm Australian) for an Office suite? Linux users are used to getting software for free, it's part of the free software movement (part, not all - freedom is the main focus). These users would most likely either illegally obtain a copy of Office or simply do without it, further harming sales.
Microsoft isn't the only company shying away from developing commercial programs on Linux and for good reason - there is no way it can be economically justified unless the software appeals to the geeks who make up 99% of the Linux user base. Most geek software is written by geeks, for geeks and so is opensource, commercial software is more often made for the average user and so isn't worth porting to Linux.
This whole discussion could have been improved a thousand times over if the original poster had done even a tiny bit of research.
Office is available for OS X.
OS X has its own GUI kit and does not run or rely on X11 in any way.
Porting to gtk or a similar kit would probably be about as difficult as porting to Cocoa/Carbon.
You guys are missing the most important part.
:)
Even if it *was* technically possible, even if the code existed today, even if it JUST required a recompile, Microsoft wouldn't provide Office for Linux.
Why?
They are SCARED of Linux! They have NO idea what to do here.
There are some political arangements between MS and Apple that allow MS to port Office to MacOSX and still save face.
Office may be ported to Linux some day, it just won't be any time soon!
Of course, I don't care, I use Emacs!
Kevin
Yes, GNUstep is X11-based. Yes, GNUstep is based on OpenStep. That doesn't mean that OpenStep was X11-based (of course, it wasn't), and, more importantly, it does not mean that GNUstep is not Cocoa-based (most of the work being done on GNUstep-gui, GNUstep's version of AppKit, is being done in order to get Cocoa compatibility).
Anyway, GNUstep is based heavily on OpenStep, with some Cocoa- and GNUstep-specific extensions. Cocoa is also based on OpenStep, with some Cocoa-specific extensions. Many of the non-OpenStep Cocoa-specific extensions are already existant and working in GNUstep.
So it's not clear: why would you even mention X11? It has no bearing whatsoever on the matter at hand. Cocoa does not use X11 so therefore GNUstep can't implement Cocoa's API? WTF kind of logic is that?!
Secondly, it's not exactly clear why you would mention OpenStep. The issue here is Cocoa, not OpenStep. Cocoa implements Cocoa (obviously); GNUstep implements Cocoa (well, okay, it's still in development). Since they both implement Cocoa, why do we care whether they're based on OpenStep or not?
Seriously, this question has been asked countless times on ask Slashdot. And the answer is always the same: OSX uses a proprietary interface -- it is not open and certainly not available on Linux and the BSDs. What other answers are there? Or, better stated, what answers are being looked for? The vast Microsoft conspiracy prevents this from being acheived? Is GNUstep the answer to the porting issue? Etc, etc, etc...
Instead of hoping for the impossible, mabye people should learn to make do with what is currently available. That also means to cease making impossible goals for an operating system with a stronger community than commercial "desktop" software backing. If you can't except this fact, you probably shouldn't be running Linux in the first place.
Why this idiotic question continues to appear on ask slashdot is beyond me.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
My boss would more then happily switch all the Win98 boxes over to Linux and pay for the Linux license instead of the Windows license for MS Office. Open Office is nice, but not there yet. Might not ever get there. The real deal MS Office would sell like hot cakes on Linux. I know for of 10 small companies and at least on state run University that would switch to Linux at the drop of a hat, could be displayed on an X desktop. I know there of a place or two that runs Citrix MetaFrame servers solely for the purpose of getting a client that can display on a Linux desktop an MS outlook and MS office. An X11 would be extremely well recieved in the market. It would however eliminate a lot of Windows 9x desktops. Which is bad for Microsoft in Microsoft's opinion.
And it would be extremely beneficial if the Cocoa apps were written in Objective C (the only other option being Java right now). GCC's Objective C front-end is extremely mature (hint: Apple modified gcc for its Objective C compiler, and gcc was the compiler used on the NeXT machines). So, conditional on how stable GNUstep is (stable enough for simple applications -- Microsoft Office may be out of the question for a couple years yet), all that would be needed is a recompile and it would work on X11.
Others have already commented more than adequately on the issues of writing to the Carbon or Cocoa APIs and how this is a significant barrier to going to a *BSD or Linux platform, so I won't belabor that point.
A more fundamental question, however, is "why bother?"
In order to justify the expense of any new port on the scale of MS Office, you have to have a really big market for it and the numbers just don't add up here. It's a tremendous committment to take on any new platform, no matter how similar a porting target it may be to one of your existing supported platforms (and that's hardly true here). You need machines running the appropriate reference bits in a myriad of departments, from engineering to media production to tech support, and you need to train your people up on supporting that particular platform. You were going to offer technical and sales support for the product, right? You were going to TEST the bits in a variety of installation scenarios, yes? All of that adds up astronomically, and it's never the simple matter of "typing make" that engineering users seem to think it is.
Just judging by how well (or not) other ISVs have done at getting big number sales in the *BSD or Linux markets, I would have to say that porting office to them would be little more than an expensive and stupid mistake for Microsoft to make. Whatever else Microsoft might be, that stupid they are not.
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
Funny, I had forgotten than Excel began its life on Macintosh (and does that make all Excels in the world a port from Mac?). I personally used Excel on Mac since '87, back when PeeC's were using Lotus or QuatroPro.
I wonder whether Word was also originally developed for Mac? I recall M$ Word for Mac in the late eighties as unwieldy and crash-prone ---but hey, you could use it almost without touching the mouse and you could show the control characters!
Many of us back then preferred MacWrite ---you needed your mouse but it was clean and consistent.
Differentiation counts for something. Porting Office to Your Favorite OS makes that OS seem like some Windows wannabe to the folks who don't (need to) care about operating systems.
How about some original ideas in the UNIX/Linux camp. instead of lame attempts to beat Windows at its own game?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Here is an interview with Kevin Browne the head of the Macintosh Business Unit at MS.
c ed ix/index.shtml
http://www.macplus.net/Actu/Dossiers/11_01_offi
You find the interview as an mp3 at the bottom of the page.
What is all this jazz about you can't do this or that, say Windows X, under OS X?
:-)
There's an explantion of how to set up mod_ssl in PDF, installing links (the browser), even an OS X port of zork from Unix, and a Solution Guide written for the novice for installing XFree86 (the X Window Server for OS X), fink, WindowMaker and GIMP, among other things, at http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/index.html This "home page" is really a download site and has other items and belongs to the guy who does MacOSXHints at http://www.macoshints.com/. They speak a little Unix and Linux there in the forums. What _is_ this problem about X Windows on a Macintosh running OSX?
Mac people have been putting up Linux and FreeBSD web sites for years. We talk a little *nix ourselves, we just prefer the colorful flavored brand and like having the best of all *nix worlds in one.
Why fool around with Office for Unix? Run it on a Mac. Exchange files in business easily. Run Windows 98, 2k, or XP under VPI 5.0 (OS X version). Boot into suse or redhat, pick your flavor, all on one drive. Use all the "classic" software like Photoshop 6 or Quark Express while running Classic under OSX, both coming to OS X in carbon or cocoa form in 2002. Let's see, there's Adobe Illustrator X and Macromedia's Freehand 10, there's a complete business suite for small business in OS9 or OSX, and students may be interested to know that the two top math apps used in grad schools are available in X, along with a host of biological science and chemistry apps. Many of the BeOS folks are moving back to X.
Sales pitch? You betcha Red Ryder. I used to do Unix, then Linux, and now I do it all with a base of OS X with built in Apache and a host of *nix shipping with the user version of X, not to mention a Developer's Toolkit tossed in with everything from the basics (like a free compiler) to advanced scripting support with AppleScript Studio, a free download if you sign up for Apple Developer Connection. Cost: free. http://www.apple.com/macosx/
Did I mention that Darwin is open source, a derivative of FreeBSD, and is the heart of Mac OS X?
Hey dudes, this is where *nix for the desktop is headed, jump on board.
(duh....what a rant).......
why don't we use XML as the standard office file format??
WINE potentially can help Microsoft programs run on many platforms without the need for extensive porting. It's a win for Microsoft isn't it?
No, it's not a win for Microsoft. It undermines Windows (which they own, sell, and make money on, by the way) as the dominant operating system, which hurts Microsoft financially (less people need to buy Windows), and strategically (since they're not in control of the dominant OS anymore, they're less influential on the market).
Microsoft wouldn't start helping WINE any sooner than General Motors would start giving their car designs to Ford.
NO CARRIER
> I had forgotten that Excel began its life on the Macintosh
That's easy to forget... I do not know any good source for such historical computing information.
> does that make all Excels a port from Mac?
Perhaps only in concept... probably the source code has changed altogether over the years since the w32 version became the reference one.
> I wonder whether Word was originally developed for Mac?
As far as I remember, yes. Again I miss a good reference for such matters. There was a MS-DOS and OS/2 version, but it shared nothing but the name with the Macintosh and w32 versions.
> I recall M$ Word for Mac in the late eighties as unwieldy and crash-prone
Again I'm not sure, but that wasn't when System 6 revealed lots of bugs hidden by System 5 and before that?
> Many of us back then preferred MacWrite
As usual the issue is not what one or other person prefers, but which piece of software had someone behind it really intent on succeeding.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Thank you for giving the first proper explanation of the differences between the Carbon and Cocoa API's! Everybody here is posting like they are hardcore Apple developers when they really have no clue what the hell they are talking about. If I only had mod points...
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Extensible, easily developed groupware solutions are what holds Linux back on the desktop. MS Office and Exchange form Microsoft's very prevalent solution here. And, it is very good at fulfilling the needs of very large corporations, security aside.
Here is why we will never see MS Office for many forms of UNIX and certainly not for Linux: protecting their monopoly. They have monopoly power in the x86-based workstation market, as the DoJ successfully proved, and this is a distinct market from the Apple, Sparc, and other markets because you cannot upgrade the system to software compiled for other architectures without an emulator.
Apple uses the PPC architecture for its systems, so Microsoft can offer Office to the Mac user without fearing that the Windows user will upgrade his PC by installing OS X... So we would see Office for Solaris, I fear, before we will see it for Linux (Sure there is a Solaris x86, but it is a bear compared to the Sparc, and is often called Slowaris).
It is all about barriers to entry.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Most people don't seem to understand that "native-mode" OSX isn't necessarily Unix compatible. Macs have had their own GUI toolbox for a long time, and I would assume that if Office does show for OSX, that it would [not] be an easy port to other Unicies."
What??? OSX is BSD Unix. It uses the Aqua GUI. What you are implying is that if a Unix distro does NOT use X11 then it is not Unix compatible. Therefore equating X11 to Unix compatibility - not to X11 compatibility.
What M$ most likely did was make a Carbonized version of Office - not a Cocoa version. Considering that you can run Office vX still under Mac OS9 this make the most sense. Therefore it is NOT a port to Unix but a port to Carbon.
Excel was first on the Mac but it was designed by Apple and given to MS because Apple had to have a killer app and at that time, louts was the killer app for PC's.
Scary as it sounds.... Word as we know it today (the multi-font proportional spacing,hierarchical memory structures) started life as a rewrite of something else (word for dos?) and it ran under real Unix[tm]. I remember MS Word for Unix running on an AT&T 3b2 and displaying on a vt100 clone back in 1987.
> Excel was first on the Mac but it was designed
> by Apple and given to MS because Apple had to
> have a killer app
That seems unlikely... why then Apple just didn't sell Apple Excel licenses like they do today with AppleWorks?
But it would not be totally absurd... often Microsoft's success has been more due to its competitors and (or) partners blunders than to its own competence, and Apple has been (and is) specially guilty of this charge.
> Word as we know it today (the multi-font
> proportional spacing,hierarchical memory
> structures) started life as a rewrite of
> something else (word for dos?) and it ran under
> real Unix[tm]. I remember MS Word for Unix
> running on an AT&T 3b2 and displaying on a vt100
> clone back in 1987
That is very interesting... but can we be sure of what started first, Word for the Mac or for MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, whatever? It would be nice to have a timeline, some documentation... that could be very hard since proprietary PC software companies are communist-like in their habit of rewriting or simply erasing history.
Also, couldn't you be just remembering Satellite WordPerfect instead? Anyway if such a beast really existed it is more likely to have been a direct port from OS/2 character cell mode than the real antecessor to Microsoft Word for the Macintosh or for Microsoft Windows.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
What, were you too afraid to put a link to Microsoft in your story submission? Do the eight seconds work, zealot boy.
At the top of the file add:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Word version="2000">
<![CDATA[
and
]]>
</Word>
at the end (other minor changes may need to be done)
Perfectly valid XML. Is it any easier for another program to read?
Well, remember what someone said about the log in your own eye. Right now there's a dozen 'popular' Unix word processors, and each of them has it's own file format. Interoperability between them is done via the Microsoft RTF format, which is modeled closely on Word's internal view of a DOC file.
So, make it so Star, Applix, WP, and KWord can talk using a standard body ratified format, and _then_ you can bitch about Microsoft.
Sorry to be a little pessimistic, but at the moment Microsoft has no motivation to port Office X to Linux. For the amount of desktop Linux users in the market right not, it would not at all be profitable to pay the cost of porting it over. It's been beaten into our heads in this topic that porting from OSX to Linux is no easy matter, and the port would require hundreds if not thousands of hours of coding, as well as beta testing, promotion, distribution costs and support. For the relatively small market of Linux desktop users, there's no way that Microsoft would achieve a decent return on their investment. I know some of you would say that they could open-source it, but we all know that Microsoft is not an open source company and probably never will be. If the linux desktop market became as big or bigger than the macintosh market, there may be possibilities for this.
That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.
The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.
The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).
But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.
Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.
Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.
Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.
Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).
The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.
I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.
I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.
The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
>It's a win for Microsoft isn't it? Well, it will
>be when they finally realize that there is a
>viable market in Non-Microsoft OS's.
Hello? Linux is NOT a viable OS for commercial apps.
A. only 0.24% desktop market share
B. Linux community refuses to pay for software (see Corel Wordperfect)
C. Linux community believes in software piracy (see the complaints from Linux users regarding *any* form of copy-protection. also, see the large involvement of Linux users in the warze scene).
All we really need is a decent text processor, and that's what FrameMaker would be. Unfortunately, the marketing crew of Adobe decided to can the Linux version (which still works fine here on NetBSD, when I reset the system date ;-).
Of course even if there was a FrameMaker for Linux the price is another thing...
- Hubert
Come on people, you're totally missing the point here. Micro$oft is a huge software house with thousands of programmers and the financial resources to run new projects for years before they bring in any revenue. If they wanted MS Office to run on Linux, they'd write a native version instead of porting the Mac or Windows version. The reason they haven't done it is because they don't want to give Linux any more credibility than it already has. Not too difficult to figure out here, folks.
Look for MS Office for Linux to appear once Linux begins to take off on the desktop without them, and some other office suite is about to run away with the market share. Then they'll pre-announce something.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Apple and Microsoft used to have a very cosy relationship. Remember the microsoft compilers for the Apple ][/III? Remember that if you wanted to run real business applications you needed the MS cobol compiler?
Apple didn't get serious about doing their own software until after a few ideas they handed to MS ended up helping other computer compaines.
I'm not sure how much of Excel was designed by Apple but their gui people most likly came up with the entire gui design.
The Unix Word file format was much like what they use now and not like the early dos word format. It had a text like file format as well (I used it to export to TeX) that was hacked into rtf. In 1986 MS Word/Unix was on the GSA contract (which means US govt depts could buy it with out too much problem and why we had it in '87) As far as which was first the Mac or Unix versions, I suspect that they were derived from the same core. Remember that PC software at that time had to deal with memroy in 64K windows and was assembly. MS was going places with Xenix at the time and it (as well as AT&T Unix) and the Mac didn't have the 64k windowing and allowed software to be written in other languages such as C and Pascal.
Linux is NOT viable for commercial apps!
A. only 0.24% desktop marketshare
B. Linux users refuse to pay for software (see Corel Wordperfect)
Therefore, porting a commercial app to Linux is a bad business investment. QED.
> Apple and Microsoft used to have a very cosy relationship
True. This still seems too much for me, but one should never underestimate corporate stupidity!
About Microsoft Word for Unix and Mac... you have great information! We should really look for more of this, it's some greate piece of knowledge that can be very instrumental in informing everyday decisions on computing and the companies behind it.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
you've hit the nail on the head. And many software companies feel this way.
I was at a Macromedia conference a few months ago and when the question came up about porting Dreamweaver et al to Linux the first reply was:
"How do we know you'll pay for it?"
And I can understand this. We have a business using Linux (cause we can) for our web/mail/routing and we want to keep an open source philosophy about everything we do -
HOWEVER
- my comrades are adament about releasing any libraries created within the business for public consumption and charge for external use of these libraries - these are two die hard linux fans who understand the nature of open source and yet still want to profit from closed source - one has to eat... hmm not being to clear on this (darn jack daniels).. but u get my point...
Hey, MORON! Office v X CANNOT be run under Mac OS 9!
I personally will never accept the 'gift' of the end of the reign of X on Unix. X has to be the best thought-out GUI design infrastructure EVER.
On top of X I can have every wizz-bang feature you can imagine, and at the same time I can start an X session here and watch it on the other side of the world.
fifth sigma, inc.
I thought their gift was the end of the CLI. You know, the single button mouse intuitive GUI that did not force you to think of how it worked. Oh well.
You cannot easily port an Aqua app to the X Window System.
Difficulty is a virtue? Hmmm, I suppose you are trying to start an X flame war by saying all those nasty things. Hopefully people won't go there. I have to wonder though, do you really program anything or do you just pull buzzwords out of your ass like, "Java apps are Aqua".
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Word and Excel on the Mac were rather famous on the Mac as being the first successful GUI adaptions of these sorts of products.
Later on, Microsoft bought a DOS wordprocessor from another company and renamed it Word. As pointed out, the charactermode version was also ported to OS/2 and apparently Unix.
The early Windows version (1 and 2) were also entirely different from the Mac and the DOS versions. They tried a unified codebase with v6, but the Mac users hated it, and the Mac and Win versions have been diverging ever since.
Excel, on the other hand, has had a similar codebase on both Mac and Windows and hasn't changed that much. Someone familiar with Excel 2 on their Mac SE would have no problem with Excel XP.
I think the question of MS office is largely moot. Open office run's on unix natively, (well at least as natively as having it's own API to cross the bridge between X and Windows). It reads all the MS formats, has a killer interface, and is completely open source, what more can you ask for. I'm really surprised it hasn't gotten more press than it has, I use it exclusively, and am very happy with it.
The main reason, as I recall reading somewhere that Microsoft will NOT release a office version for other *Nix's is because X contains no standard GUI, and OSX has auqa.
And this day in age, we are outgrowing office with apps for unix systems which contain more features and a lot less (if even) security flaws.
Office and its over priced app suite is bound to end up dying someday.
Genius! Brilliant! That's a great idea! I think this will stop a lot of the confusion and discouragement due to all these confusing file formats for Star Office, Koffice, Applix, etc. A standard file format would be a great blow against Microsoft's stronghold on Office Suites. Imagine people in the workplace, Joe Blow is using Star Office and wants to send a document to HR which are using Koffice, just save it in ".gnu, .osd (just making up random names" and wham bam thank you mam, it's done. No "kernel hacking" or anything. Of course this wont solve all the problems, but it's a step in the right direction.
And as for the conversion tool, pure genius! Instead of worrying what Office Suite converts the best, we can worry about other features that we like or don't like, and let the separate conversion tool mess around with converting.
I think I'm done kissing your ass, but anyway, it's a great idea!
> MS Office X is a Carbon application.
-snip-
> Apple claims that converting an application from
> Classic to Carbon requires changing less than
> 10% of the code, depending on how 'correctly'
> the application was written.
Good information. Ok, I can see that it was less costly to port than I originally thought. There was some cost though - how much is merely speculation.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
> No, it's not a win for Microsoft. It undermines
> Windows -snip- which hurts Microsoft financially,
> -snip- and strategically -snip-
I agree with you on the gist of your comment. However, I did say, "I can see a day..." which means that day is not today. If today was the day then your comment would be right... I meant a day in the future.
Let's try to look ahead shall we?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I don't need my friend to tell me this.
Essentially, you can look for Office / Linux the day Democrats are back in the white house, and Microsoft is split into OS and Application companies. Until then, you will have to download Star Office with the rest of the world.
> Hello? Linux is NOT a viable OS for commercial
> apps.
^^^^^^^^^^^ Fallacy ^^^^^^^^^^^ Where did you get this idea?
> A. only 0.24% desktop market share
Depends on who you ask. Today maybe but what about tomorrow... sometime in the future maybe?
> B. Linux community refuses to pay for software
> (see Corel Wordperfect)
Untrue. I bought Corel Wordperfect for Linux myself. Anyway, Corel is legendary for abandoning projects after putting much work into them.
> C. Linux community believes in software piracy
> (see the complaints from Linux users regarding
> *any* form of copy-protection.
Another fallacy. I am part of the Linux community and I don't believe in software piracy. I'd have to say that there are many more percentage points of software pirates in the Windows world than there are in the UNIX world given the same number of users. Linux users usually only dislike copy protection when it barrs them from participating in the content i.e. Sorenson Quicktime Files and DirectX games.
I'm not saying that there aren't hackers and crackers and warez and script kiddiez in the Linux crowd but the wide generalization of Linux users as being only these is patently false.
How would you like it if I said all Anonymous Cowards were idiots? Just because I said it wouldn't make it true.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Most people don't realize this, but Office X has a very interesting "feature"
If you are on a LAN and try to run an instance of Office X that has the same serial number Office X will detect this and not allow you to run the new instance!
Just putting some info out...
As for Cocoa, it's GNU GPL'd POSIX implementation is GNUStep.
Except it's not done or anything. And there's no QuickTime, AppleScript and a bunch of other stuff that Mac apps use.
As for the Microsoft products for the Mac, they weren't ported. Office 98 was written from the ground up for the Mac, as were the products that followed it. There are some apps that are Win32 ports, but they are a bit more obscure.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Anyway, don't confuse OS X with a Real Unix with Real X Windows. Support for X on OSX is a third-party effort at best.
On Mac OS X, you have to launch XFree. On Linux, you have to launch XFree. Where's the difference?
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
damm straight...maybe one of the established dev groups could hurry that puppy along...team KDE i'm looking in your direction! (Gnome would be nice, but given the stats on Koffice...)
Sounds nice in theory, but I think that the biggest stumbling block for such interoperability is that the file format and the semantics of the data stored in it, are tied incredibly tight to the model used in Word to represent documents, and probably just as much to Word's particular implementation of it.
.doc file contains the value of the variable FooBar' where FooBar is something entirely implementation-specific.
Think problems like 'the third octet of the
The people who developed Word had no incentive at all to make things more abstract, because Word's whole business model is mostly based on the idea that Word documents can only be used reliably with Word.
What we need instead is a better document editing paradigm and a portable format that goes with it. We can only be worse than Word itself as long as we try to imitate it. And there can be no conversion filter that's actually usable without imitating Word's document models.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
Let's see, what questions might they ask themselves:
- Is there a market today? With less than 1pct of the desktop share, no there isn't.
- Would it support Microsoft's other strategies? Not really. In fact it would tend to undermine their Windows position. Most Linux users have probably already gone to Java rather than .Net
- Would there be any partnership benefits?Would Linux users help develop Microsoft software? Er, I don't think so.
So, the hapless VP at Microsoft responsible for Office just wouldn't be able to make a case for porting it to Linux. There's just no business case.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
How does that not make it Unix? OK, it's not binary compatible with Linux. It uses a different Window server than X11, is that a crime?
If you read my parent post, you'd realise that I was quibbling over them saying that, because it's a Mac Carbon application, it's not a Unix application.
Yes, and in between the public beta and the final (this time last year), came the great CoreFoundation/Carbon overhaul. They changed the implementations of a lot of stuff, Menus, strings, etc. Unless you were reading release notes, you would have missed it because they did a good job of it.
When did I claim anything otherwise?
You lose me here. MacOSX has it's roots in Unix and it is *still* unix. NT is based on VMS but you can't really still call it that. Bad comparison!
Yes and most Linux applications are written to GUI libraries like GTK. Are you suggesting that GUI calls should be in the kernel?
No, they aren't going to turn into *Linux* applications. You seem to have the idea that Linux is the one and only Unix and unless it is EXACTLY compatible with Linux it isn't Unix. Sorry dude, X11 isn't synonymous with Unix GUI. It is the most popular window server for Unixes but the lack of X11 doesn't stop it being Unix.
Resisting the urge to make a passing "small brain" shot like you did.
What people call MacOS X is not an Operating System. Though Apple would prefer that people think of MacOS X as the entire "package" that comes on the installation CD, MacOS X has little to do with the underlaying kernel and unix apps. You can get that part of it here and run it on your good ol' x86 machine. So that's the UNIX that Apple brags about all day.
Now, MacOS X is composed of a graphics server (think XFree86), a GUI toolkit (think Qt and Gtk+), a desktop environment (think Gnome and KDE), and applications. Of course, MacOS X is really smart and has bindings for many languages, translates Java Swing interfaces into native Aqua, offers a nice backward compatibility interface which enables MacOS 9 apps to be ported to MacOS X, etc.; however, all of this magic stuff happens far away from the UNIX part of the system. It all happens above the graphics server layer.
If you've ever programmed Qt or Java Swing, you'll know that you need to know absolutely nothing about the system that your app will run on (be it Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, etc.) in order to build a large GUI application. All of the disk, socket, thread, etc. operations are neatly abstracted away from the core system.
In short, Microsoft Office X is not programmed for the MacOS X UNIX system, it is programmed for the Aqua GUI toolkit, which runs on Apple's display server, which runs on a UNIX core. If Microsoft were to port their Office software to Linux, for example, they would not program it for Linux. They would program it for Qt, probably. And then compile it for Linux. Which is a huge task with little return, so we most likely won't see it anytime soon...
Cocoa, on the other hand, is very different and is a totally new creature, and one that is proprietary, I'm afraid.
What gave you the idea that Cocoa is "totally new?" NeXTStep - the toolkit upon which Cocoa is based - was introduced in 1985.
I don't think we will see a Cocoa compatability layer for Linux - ever.
Think again - the GNUStep is precisely that.
Maybe there's an easier way. Release 5.2 of StarOffice, from Sun Microsystems, contained Linux, Solaris SPARC and Solaris Intel, and MS Windows versions.
Yes Apple released OS X almost a year ago now... and it IS, not appears to be, based on NetBSD and OpenStep, and a windowing engine called Quartz.
There is no "if there is an Office suite" because it was released a month ago from MSFT.
The simple answer is that a port to *nix is not easy because this version of Office is Carbon and not Cocoa. Please read up on these old topics if you are un-learned.
Should *nix have Office?! Yes. As they should have QT player and a host of other sw.
So we can expect that MicroScorch Office v23.l1.32 around the year 2011 to be available only in Chinese. That's in keeping with MicroScorch's philosophy of only going after the biggest chunk of the market and then either destroying the rest of the market or dragging it to some other place.
You hate Windows, you like like Linux/Unix, you love Office...
Is it too expensive to get a Mac? That's hardly a critical showstopper.
GPL Deconstructed
Thats economics as well, isn't it? That's the whole concept of demand :)
GPL Deconstructed
I can't help but think.. hey.. why do all these anti-microsoft weirdos care about MS Office? I thought the whole point of everyone running UNIX systems in the first place is to rebel against the "evil giant".
The amazingly wonderful thing about UNIX is the lack of standards that you all have come to hate (note: The answer to the question "what do you dislike about Microsoft" consistently receives the reply "Windows applications have standards, and we want alternatives to Windows, thus we must remove standards"). Any alternative operating system to MS Windows, including UNIX and whatever linux installations you care to dream up, obviously is going to lack any decent standard for generic applications like word processing, etc. Everyone creating these operating systems dreams up their own "standard", but as you should know by now it never seems to work out right... because everyone using UNIX systems seems to use a different standard.
Good luck getting every-day people to use much other than Windows. I don't see it happening any time soon. Monopoly? sure. Abuse? maybe. Run another operating system? yeah right. maybe variations of Windows. UNIX will always be a geek toy. Do geek stuff in unix and do normal people stuff in windows.
I'm a Mac user, mostly, but I don't use Office or Word. When I need to exchange formatted text with someone, I use RTF. It's a Microsoft standard so there is never any problem with other people being able to open it in Word, and I can use AppleWorks. RTF has been around for years and years, and all Office suites I've ever used already support it. If Office suites on Linux don't support it, perhaps that's the issue.
I think even if MS office was ported to unix, God forbid, not many would use it. I started using unix to get away from MS products and for its ease-of-use and great development platform. Also, don't forget about StarOffice. It's just as good as MS office. :)
IE for Solaris is based on a partial port of win32 to solaris--with this you could theoretically port office for win32 to Solaris and therefore *nix.
You sure could. This is done with a tool called Visual Mainwin that actually contains bits of the NT source code in their and works in conjunction with MS other dev tools. There's a native Linux port of Visual Mainwin.
Remember when Wordperfect existed for many platforms, even the Amiga?
For Unix, best you can get is get the source code to Open Office and then try a GCC compiler on it. it should work with most MS-Office file formats.
For the benefit of all /.'ers who have been living under rocks...
1. MS Office has already been out on OS X for nearly two months now.
2. You can have your cake and eat it too, get a Mac, install Mac OS X, install X11, and run your *n*x apps right next to top shelf, brand name wares you'll never see on *n*x. Install VPC 5.0 (or Bochs) and run Windows apps too.
3. Nobody uses *n*x machines as office productivity desktops, not because of a lack of office software, but because the *n*x desktop experience is horrible.
4. Apple is now the single largest *nix vendor in the world. Resistance is futile!
because M$ has a corpulent belly full of dough.
What is preventing developers from using Java or C# and how fast of a processor would be required to run an application the size of Office? People say Java is too slow for OTS software. What if everyone had a 100 GHz chip? It won't be long. I noticed Adobe has a Java version of Acrobat Reader for OSX.
The people who wrote Claris Works, which is the original source for Apple Works, are also responsable for Gobe, which is like a BeOS port of Claris Works, only better, have brought out a version of Gobe for Windows & are making a Linux port too.
I don't think this is as much of a case of protecting market share as much as it is as MS (and many other desktop developers in this case) being able to see Free Software as a valid revenue stream.
Until developers have evidence of being able to make money selling software to people who use a free os, then more developing houses will write software for that platform.
It's not a question of can they do it, it's a question of is it worth doing.
(psst.. the reason why Microsoft was using FreeBSD/QMAIL for Hotmail in early days, because Microsoft actually acquired Hotmail!) We got .NET for FreeBSD, why can't we get Office
[ Microsoft is afraid that people can use FreeBSD emulation to use Office on Linux ]
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Is there an actual correct definition? Personally, I think we're splitting hairs. I mean were arguing about a name that doesn't really exist. We know what Unix means, but Unix application? That's getting much more vague.