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Sun Joins Mac Open Office Development

Posted by kdawson on from the bye-bye-X11 dept.

widhalmt writes "In a blog post, a developer at Sun Microsystems announces that Sun will help with porting Open Office to Mac OS X. The open source office suite is well known on Linux and Windows, but does not have a native version on Mac OS. For a long time Sun did not want to join the development of that port but now they will actively push it."

4 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Not true! NeoOffice! by wheatwilliams · · Score: 5, Informative

    OpenOffice.org runs on Mac OS X under X11.
    NeoOffice is an independently developed version of OpenOffice.org 2.1 which runs on Mac OS X natively and without the need for X11. I've been using it for years.

    1. Re:Not true! NeoOffice! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you've looked at the latest Mac builds from the OpenOffice native port team, you will see that there is no contest with NeoOffice. NeoOffice is using a bad approach. Adding another layer of indirection (through Java) was a bad idea from the start, and became an even worse idea when Apple deprecated the Java-Cocoa bridge. The native implementation (demoed at FOSDEM) is significantly faster, and will be much more maintainable since it does things the right way from the start. I occasionally fire up NeoOffice/J, and within five minutes I've remembered why I don't do it more often. The native port looks like something I might actually consider using.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Not true! NeoOffice! by nine-times · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unfortunately, though, this application gives new meaning to the words 'slow' and 'bloated'.

      Well, it's not snappy, but it's certainly better than the "nothing" that OpenOffice has been offering in terms of native OSX ports.

      The author has also chosen to make its license (GPL) incompatible with OO.o's (LGPL) so that his porting efforts cannot be contributed back to the main project. That makes NeoOffice a very hostile fork.

      I'd probably be hostile, too. IIRC, the backstory with NeoOffice was that they were trying to work with OOo on a native OSX port, and not only did Sun refuse to help, but they basically sabotaged their efforts. Rather than give up, these guys split off and started their own project, and because of that, OSX users have had a very functional free office suite for OSX for a couple years now.

      What's more, he is trying (against the terms of the GPL/LGPL) to limit free distribution by using the trademark loophole.

      Protecting your trademark is not a "loophole". All sorts of projects, whether they're commercial (Redhat) or not (Mozilla), protect their trademarks. Worst case scenario?-- you take the source and strip out trademarked graphics/names, recompile, and then you're free to distribute the results however you want (under the GPL).

      I don't want to be misunderstood: I'm happy that Sun is finally porting OpenOffice to OSX. The result may very well be superior to NeoOffice, and if so I'll use Sun's version. However, they've been taking their sweet damn time, and in the mean time, the NeoOffice team has made a very useful bit of software. I don't think we should be belittling the NeoOffice team and their terrific efforts simply because they don't have the resources to perfect their port. They've been doing a lot with very little while OOo has been doing practically nothing with their bounty.

  2. Best intentions, but still... by realinvalidname · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the blog:

    MacOSX and Aqua are quite new to me, so please bear with me as I learn about this (for me) exciting new platform at first. Certainly I will have many questions for my fellow Mac porters. However I can contribute ~10 years experience with vcl which I think the port can benefit from.

    The problem has always been that OO.o makes assumptions about GUI development that are well-suited to X11 and Windows, and not well-suited to Aqua. The question is, can someone who's learning Mac development as he goes push changes back to OO.o to make it more suitable for Aqua and other GUI toolkits? Can he do it before Sun changes their mind and de-funds the Mac port? Sun has a habit of funding things for about six months and then getting cold feet.

    Which reminds me: I should throw some money at Ed and Patrick for their continued work on NeoOffice, which uses Java as a GUI adapter (!) to get OO.o tolerable on the Mac