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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.
"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.
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.
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
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
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
- 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
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.
Exchange is horrible for the Internet, but an absolute godsend for inter-office and intra-office communications. Honestly, I would not give up internal exchange servers for anything (except for a free, open source *NIX variant with all the functionality). The shared calendars alone are worth the liscencing fees.
AWG
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
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.
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....
> 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.
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....
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
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 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.
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
Actually:
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.
Misconception alert: When you but TS, and use it remotely, you need to by a "Desktop" license. That means a workstation (or pro) license to MS. Office gets the same treatment. 1 user = 1 license. 20 users = 20 license. What it comes down to is the fact that MS get's the same amount of cash if you run it on your PC, or remote over Term Server.
Seeing I'm on the subject, have you ever actually USED the Ica client on Linux? It is crap. Nothing paints right, and it is slower than your mother on ludes. On a 100Mbit LAN, it performs like VNC over a 2400 baud modem. I compare that to running the ICA client on Windows, and it works like you are sitting on the real term server machine.
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.
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.
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
"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 really. They both use the Mach 3 microkernel but that's pretty much where the similarity ends.
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.
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.)
Neither Carbon nor Cocoa are unix APIs. Porting
from either of them to unix is a significant task.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
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!
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...
Nope. Did you know, for example, that you've been able to get IE for Solaris for quite a while now? The first thing they'd need to do is move over the COM system, and implement a registry-alike. This would already have the Linux zealots screaming. Then, they'd need to start making choices. What window managers to they support? What widget sets? Do they make their own? They don't do it because they know that they'd be unable to do it in any successful way with the user base. No matter how they did it, 70 percent of the users would be crying and screaming.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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
MS bought $150M of non-voting Apple stock. WHich isn't a lot when you consider the overall value of Apple. Apple is worth billions and they have about $4B in cash reserves.
MS has since sold the shares anyway.
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.
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.
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
There you go not understanding what you are talking about..
For intents and purposes based on common definitions of that a Unix is, macosx is unix.
Carbon and Cocoa are API's made for macosx, therefore they are API's for a unix, they aren't api's for linux or freebsd or whatever but they are unix api's and actually porting them to other unixs/unices/whatever wouldn't be that tremendous of a task, the problem is that they aren't opensource..
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
Sure, but both require a giant library of stuff to work. Oddly enough the newer lib (Cocoa) is easier to port to random Unix systems because it is more or less NeXTStep. The other lib is more or less 90% of the old MacOS API.
Sure, you can port a Carbon program to a Unix system (give the source code), as long as you implement 90% of MacOS 9 in a user level library. Of corse you could port a Carbon program to VMS, PalmOS, VM/CMS, or the ROM monitor on a SPARC if only you implement 90% of MacOS 9 for it...
Doable, but not easy.
Of corse they do, it makes it sound somehow cool, and also like normal Mac users will never have to learn a single thing about it (and they don't...unless they were the kind of Mac user that fiddled with ResEdit for the fun of it).
Yeah, but not in the sense that it is easy to port to another Unix. I keep struggling for a good analogy, and coming up with nothing. At least nothing stunning. It's a lot like taking a PhotoShop plugin that happens to work on a Windows machine, and saying "look it runs on Windows, it's a Windows program". Sure it is. In theory it could be run without PhotoShop, in practice it's a real pain to recreate enough of PhotoShop to run PhotoShop plugins (or worse yet, actions).
So yeah, with the exception of Classic stuff that runs under OSX are Unix programs, but not always in a useful way!
You are forgetting something : IE uses a lot of components already available in Windows (DLLs and OCX). The HTML rendering engine is itself an OCX component. I guess the Unix versions have to come with extra code to make up for the lack of these component on Unix systems.
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.
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
Er, is there any problem with "all of them"? I've written a bunch of X apps, and none of them give a crap what window manager you run them under.
The rest of your argument looks more or less correct, look at all the complaints about Mozilla using GTK and not Qt, and then about it not really using GTK so much, and...
Of corse that didn't stop other Unix apps from making the choices (normally badly -- er, I mean normally Motif), and not get too many complaints...well, maybe a lot of complaints, but they are easy to brush off...mostly because I have no access to explosives, no, wait, I didn't say that out loud.
I might have expressed myself poorly, and it's been a while since I've looked into it all, but I mainly mean Gnome vs KDE; font servers, drag/drop, cut&paste, all that stuff.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Dude, you need to get your facts straight.
"Aqua" refers to the GUI layer of the Mac OS API's, i.e. the PDF-based, Display PostScript-derived graphics layer (quartz) and the "look and feel" that goes along with it. Aqua is not an API in and of itself.
There are 2 native Mac OS API's-- Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is a streamlined subset of the classic OS 9 API's designed to work well under preemptive multitasking. Cocoa is the NextStep-derived API's, which are supposed to be the future of the Mac OS.
Developers typically choose one API or the other to write their code in. Carbon prefers C/C++ and makes it easy to port existing OS 9 apps to the new OS. Cocoa uses Objective C or Java as the base language, and generally requires a from-scratch re-write.
Unlike the switch to PPC, Mac OS X does *not* run anything in emulation (aside from the Classic process, which can be switched off entirely if one doesn't want to run classic apps) Carbon is a 100% native Mac OS X API's, and is fully preemptive, fully uses modern memory management, etc. No "old MacOS code" is to be found in Carbon. They implemented many of the same API's, but the code to do so is entirely Mac OS X native.
Office X (like most existing apps) was most likely written as a Carbon app. That means that it has *no* similarlities to OpenStep, and porting it to OpenStep would be practically the same as re-writing it from scratch.
When you say "there aren't any significant OS/X native apps," perhaps you mean that there aren't very many Cocoa apps. This is true, but it's simply wrong to confuse Cocoa with "native." Carbon is *not* a Mac OS 9 emulation layer. Carbon apps are every bit as "native" as Cocoa apps. They happen to call an API set similar to the classic Mac OS API's for the convenience of developers, but the code implementing these API's is entirely new.
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.
Yeah you do, different CPUs in many cases, and a different implmentation may have diffrent bugs (or fix some that a few things rely on). It should be an easy port though...unless the orignal was written in assembly.
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...
The anonymous coward has the real story.
I have nothing to add.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
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
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.
Actually, I do have something to add. Saying that
porting Carbon or Cocoa to unix would be easy except
that they're not open source is like saying that it
would be easy to take a trip to the moon except that
it's far away. When I said that porting from Cocoa
or Carbon to unix APIs would not be trivial, I meant
exactly what I said. A Carbon port of Office can't
be a basis for a Linux port because *Carbon doesn't
run on Linux*.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
As the AC points out, you are correct.
Here it is from the horse's mouth on MSDN: Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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).......
i hear a lot about openoffice or abiword or other open-source office replacements, and the only problem common to them all is that migrating from office formats to their formats is a bitch. .doc format, and when i became editor i moved it all to opensource software. NONE of the alternatives, (abiword or staroffice, on which openoffice is based) would open the .doc correctly
i know this from cruel experience, i used to work for a small group that did its newsletter in ms word's
staroffice came close, abiword did a decent job, but the problem was always the images and the tables -- the images would always either get mangled or not show up at all, and the tables were never correctly rendered
i ended up rewriting the entire template in abiword, but no one who cares more about getting the job done than promoting opensource would bother..
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
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
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
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
Does the *nix community need MS-Office?
I would say not.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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
Now you know how WordPerfect/Lotus 1-2-3/etc. users felt when the world switched to MS Office.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
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
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
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.
In the unix world it's Tex and postscript mostly.
War is necrophilia.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
There are a number of apps that have been dong this for a long time.. Stuff-it Deluxe for example would check the local Appletalk network for multiple copies of the app during the install..
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
The server does not impact the desktop market. Apple would not deny that linux is a part of that. They want to make streaming video widely available, so the server is free, and the source is available under the Mac Darwin source license. Whether this is open source is subject to interpretation.
This does not impact what I said, though. There are no media PLAYERS available for linux that play WMF 2.0 or Quicktime with the Sorenson codec. These are patented algorithms used in media players that are freely available on Windows and Mac platforms. Windows makes a MacOS player for WMF available. Mac makes a Windows QT player available. But neither will even ALLOW the algorithms to be coded in linux. Why is that ? It doesn't impact the market (they are not making any money), and it makes freely available media streams more widely available.
The only rational explanation is that Apple and Microsoft are colluding to block free Unices from the desktop marktet. No Office, no streaming media. They will each hurt their own streaming server markets in order to hurt the linux desktop market - almost textbook collusion.
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.
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.
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.