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.

Comments

Microsoft vs. Unix security

[Tom7]

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.

Re:Listen up on Mac OS X

[ellem]

Hey marktwain aren't you dead?