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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."

8 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 Apple+Acolyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
    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. Will they unarchive? by Frequency+Domain · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sun already owns the rights to Lighthouse Design's application suite. Since these were originally developed for NeXTstep/OpenStep, they should be relatively easy to migrate to Cocoa. I'd sure like to see an Improv/Quantrix like spreadsheet tool put a stake through the heart of Excel!

  3. Re:NeoOffice is not 'native' in a sense... by tb3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  4. Port it all you want... by HerculesMO · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It still pales in comparison to MS Office.

    Yes, I am complimenting Microsoft -- I am sure I'll be flamed for it. But frankly, they make the best office suite, and since theirs is the standard look and feel (although the new Office is a departure), the other guys have to play catchup.

    I would love to use OpenOffice, I just hate the look and feel and have always been more comfortable in Microsoft Office.

    --
    The price is always right if someone else is paying.
  5. Exciting! Can't Wait! by ironring2006 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As someone who has used OOo on Windows/Linux/OS X, I have to admit that the OS X X11 implementation feels like the biggest kludge. I've been attempting to move all my documents over to the ODF, but everytime I boot up OOo on my Mac, I get frustrated with so many things about it. As slow as Word is on OS X running under Rosetta, recently I've been finding myself using that much more. I haven't tried Neooffice yet, because I can't imagine using something slower. On the other hand, I've found OOo quite a good replacement under windows.

    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.

  6. We never used CocoaJava by soullessbastard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    ed