Slashdot Mirror
NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally In Beta
VValdo writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's vigorous debate re OpenOffice.org for OS X, the 1.1 beta of NeoOffice/J is now available. Based on Oo.o 1.1.3, improvements include native Mac menus, scroll wheel support, text drag-and-drop, smaller PDFs, new icons, localization for 40 languages, automatic update notification, and much more. No X11 server required!"
We're not a non-profit but we're also not a commercial entity either. We're a group of volunteers who are doing this and hosting the project. For two years we didn't have any type of donate page or the like and just encouraged people to contribute by answering questions in forums, testing, or developing. Funny enough, there are still people who don't want to contribute in those ways. This started a fairly vigorous discussion as to whether we should give those people another vehicle for helping out. You can check out the user community debate back in November as to how things wound up the way they are now and where they will hopefully be going.
;)
:(
To organize as a non-profit in the state of California requires filing paperwork, meeting minimum tax requirements, and other state and federal requirements. We're not expecting to see a lot of monetary donations, so instead of shelling out all that capital to set up a new corporate entity and lose money we don't have (!) we just reused one of the S-corps we already had set up.
We couldn't just take money directly as that opens us up to personal legal liability, a bad thing for us Americans with our predatory legal system. We also can't afford to do it personally due to tax reasons. Right now we're only hoping to get enough to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs. If people actually do start donating enough though we've already decided we'll go through all the hassle of setting up a non-profit entity. It's unfortunately not worth that much hassle for just a few hundred dollars in donations
Still, I'd rather encourage people to donate time, support, and hopefully code instead. It's much more useful then money. Unfortunately time and code are more then most people are able or willing to give
ed
I've been using the X11 port for a long time now, and I was hoping Neo/J would offer some performance boost over the sluggish OOo/X11 system. While the interface is snappy and responsive, the program consumes a ridiculous amount of system resources. Over 100 MB of my physical memory? And I thought the kernel was a memory hog.
I like the fact that I can use the Apple command key instead of ctrl, but unless the devs are willing to give me a free 512 MB or Gig DIMM, I think I'll wait for something with a smaller memory footprint.
Glog!
FWIW, one of the primary reasons that neither OOo, NeoOffice/J, nor AbiWord have grammar checkers is that no good open source grammar checker tools exist yet. Just about any grammar checker worth its salt is completely closed source. There are some options available, though...
The Link Grammar Parser is one that I've actually been keen on integrating with NeoOffice/J for quite some time. I have ideas on how to do so but have not yet had time to devote to it. I had been waiting for an OSS license for a couple of years for it, but unfortunately I think their new license was incompatible with GPL and can't be used in OOo or NeoOffice/J. Aside from that parser, I don't really know of any other good OSS grammar projects for English, much less all the foreign languages that need to be supported too!
If you have knowledge of any other OSS grammar engines (or contacts for acquiring and freeing source code for a defunct grammar checker like Correct Grammar please contact me!
ed