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Sun Joins Mac Open Office Development
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."
Have you tried the latest major release of NeoOffice? For an office suite, it's awesome. NeoOffice has matured through years of development, and unless Sun joins the NeoOffice effort it's going to take a long time before they produce something that rivals it, I imagine. Give the NeoOffice guys credit where it's due.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Given its heavy use of Java I think the 'native' qualification is debatable. Some aspects are native (e.g. font management), which is certainly a major plus.
Unfortunately, though, this application gives new meaning to the words 'slow' and 'bloated'. 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. What's more, he is trying (against the terms of the GPL/LGPL) to limit free distribution by using the trademark loophole.
So, I would say that while a port exists, it's both low quality and under bad management, and I welcome this new effort to do it properly.
Sun is pushing for a non-Java, non-X11 native solution.
I hope you appreciate the irony of that statement.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I must be doing something wrong, since my NeoOffice (2.1 patch 3) takes about 10 seconds to start.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
So I say, bring it on! I think that getting a good implementation of OOo running natively under Aqua is key in the cause of reducing reliance on Microsoft. People switching to Linux obviously are going to use OOo or some other open format, but still too many people switching to Mac are relying on Microsoft. It'll be curious to see whether they take Firefox's approach to have the interface be consistent across the board, or if they try and take advantage of OS X's toolkits and design guides to make it a true Mac application.
Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Quote: and became an even worse idea when Apple deprecated the Java-Cocoa bridge
We never used the CocoaJava bridge at all. I guess you never bothered to read the source code. In fact, we use very little Java at all as is pointed out by the ohloh source code analysis of our open CVS. There's little Objective-C as we do most of the logic in C++ and call out to ObjC when required. There are some other stats there you may find intriguing as well like the estimated man-years and cost it will take to approximate our code.
Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.
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