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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.
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.
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.
Microsoft does not own a nice chunk of Apple. They bought $150k worth of non-voting stock a few years back. $150k, contrary to what many people think, is just a drop in the bucket to Apple. Apple is actually a multi-billion dollar company.
MS will continue to make a Office suite for MacOS because if they don't it will be another prime example of how, as a monopoly, they can control the fate of other companies.
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....
NO, they sold all of their interest in Apple since acquiring it in '97.
agreed. the $150m was non-voting, the $150m was a tiny percentage. i'm so tired of the "ms ownz apple" or "ms bailed out apple" misapprehensions.
not to mention -- dudes, do a teeny bit if research! a mac os x-only version of ms office has been on the shelves for months. in addition, we've all known ms was working on it for the better part of the year. i'm not a fan of either -- i'm not promoting them -- but really, think before you sound an alarm.
for a unix-based effort, go look at www.openoffice.org.
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
The NeXT-based DisplayPostScript (actually, in OS X, DisplayPDF) *is* network transparent. I can remotely start up NeXT applications between by cube and my slab. In addition, with 'public sound server' option, the sound is also network transparent (which ESD and ARTS have caught up to).
Of course, if you do this, you'll need to probably enable "Encapsulate PostScript" option to prevent malicious inline PS code from being executed on object refreshes.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
OS X has something called a Remote Operation API (apparently only documented in header files), that allows you to remotely display an OS X desktop, and to inject input device events. It's more like VNC than the X Window System, but it's use is transparent to applications. There's an OS X VNC port that uses it.
You really should get a clue before you get out your flamethrower. Cocoa does not make a GUI app portable to other UNIX boxes. Cocoa apps are not X Window apps; they therefore cannot run UNIX systems for whom X Window is the only GUI. For the app to be portable to another UNIX, either the app would have to be an X Window app (and thus not Cocoa) or the target UNIX would have to support Aqua (wouldn't Apple's legal team have a field day with this one?)
You're 100% right on one point: YOU REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS ARGUMENT
Both of you understand the argument. Unfortunately, you, AC (and the original poster), do not understand Mac OS X.
There's one very strong reason why many people would like to see Office for Linux (or any other free UNIX) -- because they want to move away from Windows, but Office is "standard" everywhere.
I work with several publishers who won't accept manuscripts in anything but Word, which means that if you want to write or edit for those companies -- even if you're working on their Linux books -- you have to bow down to Office.
There are a lot of people who HATE Windows but love Office. Honestly, StarOffice et al. haven't caught up to Word's revision features. I wish they would, and soon, but until then there are a lot of businesses that would benefit enormously from being able to run Office on Linux or *BSD because the only apps they need are mail, browser and Word and Excel. (And maybe Access...) Frankly, I'd rather write in Vim any day, but just try to convince a large publisher to accept chapters in plain text, LaTeX or DocBook. And I'm not talking about O'Reilly.
StarOffice is just fine for typing a quick letter or whatever, but its revision control isn't up to snuff and it still has trouble converting Word docs. I'm no champion of Microsoft or their products, but if Microsoft were to port Office to Linux I strongly believe you'd see a surge in Linux on the desktop -- precisely why they won't do it. Why don't you see tons of Macs? Damned expensive hardware, that's why. Commodity PCs + Free OS + Office == Happy Businesses.
I really don't know anyone who uses Linux to be "trendy" though I know a lot of people who find the migration difficult if they try to replicate the Windows experience under Linux.
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!
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.
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.
Pot, kettle.
Mac OS X is an operating system based on the Mach microkernel that exposes a UNIX-like API (or OS "personality"). That's the interface that the BSD services are based on. For all you know, Cocoa and Carbon may use the Mach API directly instead of going through the BSD personality. In which case, yes, porting them to another UNIX variant would be a tremendous task.
To say that "macosx is unix" is like saying BeOS (or, god forbid, NT) is UNIX because it has a POSIX API.
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