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MS Office for OSX? Why not for Unix as Well?

Posted by Cliff on from the things-that-make-you-go-"hmmm" dept.

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.

3 of 479 comments (clear)

  1. OS X GUI is not X Windows by __aaahtg7394 · · Score: 3, Redundant

    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.

  2. Cocoa != X11 by uriyan · · Score: 4, Redundant

    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.

  3. Here is why... the story of 2 api's by acomj · · Score: 4, Redundant
    Apple has 2 api's available for MacOSX.

    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....