OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Alpha Released!

An anonymous reader writes "Nearly 6 years after announcing a Mac port, OpenOffice.org has released the first release of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X that can finally run without X11!! An alpha is available for download today, but a lot of help is still needed to make OpenOffice.org available for Mac OS X. The site is very blunt: 'WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. This is an alpha test version so that developers and users can find out what works and not, and make comments on how to improve it.' Currently missing functionality includes printing, pdf export, copy/pasting, and multiple monitors. That said, if you're interested in participating you can visit the Mac team to figure out how you can help today."

Comments

Good news

[tsa]

That is good news. Although the 'normal' version works like a dream on the Mac, having it work without X11 is a bit handier. I wish I could run it on one of those new MacBook Pro's that came out just 2 minutes ago...

Re:Good news

[kosmosik]

> Although the 'normal' version works like a dream on the Mac,
> having it work without X11 is a bit handier.

Well maybe OOo/Mac/X11 itself works well. The problem is that Apple X11 implementation is crap. You actually need to do stuff from like early 90s Linux to make it work with non-US keyboard layout and this is pain. It can be done via some hacking (like editing cryptic text files and so on) but it disqualifies X11 apps on OSX to rest of the world (apart from geeks).

So native version of OOo is always welcomed. Also I would love to see better X11 from Apple.

Re:Good news

[jschmitz]

Pretty cool I will have to dial this in on my mini! \m/

Re:Good news

[suv4x4]

So native version of OOo is always welcomed. Also I would love to see better X11 from Apple.

Your words are a law written in stone for me, milord! [rushes to improve X11]

Regards, Apple

Re:Good news

[LKM]

The problem is that Apple X11 implementation is crap (...) it disqualifies X11 apps on OSX to rest of the world (apart from geeks).

And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is for Geeks, not for "regular" users. The existing issues with X11 are intentional.

Re:Good news

[itsdapead]

You actually need to do stuff from like early 90s Linux to make it work with non-US keyboard layout and this is pain.

Yeah, but Apple don't really do non-US keyboards, do they? They just replace the # key with the local currency symbol (presumably because USAians call it the "pound" sign). What? You still need to type a # sometimes? This is a minor pain when using Parallels/Bootcamp especially if you do something really deviant like plugging in an actual, non-Apple non-US keyboard.

Re:Good news

[diamondsw]

X11 on the Mac is X11 with all of its warts, all the way down to startx and xorg.conf. What makes it so skanky and wretched on OS X is that it's not the native windowing system, and it shows, painfully so. Nothing integrates seamlessly; everything is a hack. Think of the worst of original Java programs, and that's about what it feels like.

This has little to nothing to do with "Apple's implementation", which was a lot better than the original XDarwin X11 port.

Re:Good news

[kosmosik]

> And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is for Geeks, not for "regular" users.

Yeah so maybe just throw out some source code of X11 that barely compiles and you need to fix it yourself. No binary release - then it would be even geekier. :)

> The existing issues with X11 are intentional.

Yeah. :) That is what I love Mac fanatics - if something is broken in OSX it must be intentional. LoL.

Re:Good news

[kosmosik]

I've mean keyboard layout so you can input national characters like etc.

X11 on OSX generally works. But try f.e. typing something with above characters. You need to edit some config files add some layout definition files etc. etc. - in Linux f.e. it works out of the box.

Re:Good news

[Random832]

Apple does have national keyboard layouts - they just occasionally are different from the PC national keyboard layouts. As it happens, the apple UK keyboard layout simply replaces the currency symbol (well, on physical keyboards, the names of keys like "page up", "home", etc, aren't written out either, but the £ sign is the only layout difference) but here you can see pictures of a canadian french apple keyboard.

Geez, that's like saying apple doesn't "do" US keyboards because there's no num lock key. Their non-US layouts are different, not nonexistent

Re:Good news

[HTH NE1]

Although the 'normal' version works like a dream on the Mac

Maybe you like your spreadsheets to always open maximized, but I don't. I've never been able to get the X11 Mac version to remember the size and position of spreadsheet document's window and restore it properly on open. I always have to unmaximize to get the resize widget to appear, then drag it to my desired size (yes, the unmaximized window size is also the same size as the display). Hardware is a G4 Cube, software is the latest version (the previous version was crashing attempting to copy a sheet of a spreadsheet to a new sheet).

And the slow redraws if you dare try to move to another cell while the spreadsheet is redrawing its recalculation are very annoying. It's like just moving to another cell causes the recalculation to abort and start over again.

Re:Good news

[ajs318]

Doesn't option+3 give you a comment sign on a UK Apple Macintosh?

Re:Good news

[Anonymous Coward]

On my Finnish Mac keyboard, shift-3 equals hash, option-3 equals pound (UK pound), shift-option-3 equals yen. Shift-4 equals euro, option-4 equals dollar and shift-option-4 equals cent. The "3" key has the "#" symbol on it, and the "4" has the euro symbol. My keyboard also has the "å" "ä" and "ö" keys.

Re:Good news

[@madeus]

Alt-3 (aka Option-3) does indeed give you a hash symbol on a UK Apple keyboard.

I've always assumed this is a pun on it also being refered to as a 'pound' symbol - as in the imperial measurement for weight (used particularly in the US, and in days gone by in the UK). I assume it's a pun of sorts as shift-3 gives you the pound symbol, as for the GBP (the currency) - although it's also a good place as it's easy to remember, as long as you are familer with the anachronistic terminology (which is outdated in the UK at any rate).

It's always interesting to watch all the new Mac converts in the office try to write a shell script on their new Mac for the first time... "WTF, where is the # key on my laptop? Aarg!"

As marginally useful for some media types as ± / " " is on the top right, frankly I think it's nowhere near as useful as say having ` there (and putting # where that is). The current waste of space by the ±/" " is just retarded, given so few people use it (or even know what the hell " " is for).

NB: If you can't see " ", it's the "Section" symbol (like an S, with a circle in the middle).

Re:Good news

[richlv]

that bit about "#" was funny, thanks :)
as for 'section', maybe you mean "paragraph" symbol ? if so, indeed, i haven't seen it used for 10 or more years, except in some legalese or books.

Re:Good news

[@madeus]

as for 'section', maybe you mean "paragraph" symbol ? Yeah, thanks, that's the name I was looking for. I couldn't remember the name (though I knew what it was for) so I Googled for it but 'section character' was all came up (on some page explaining character codes).

IIRC I think some typesetting / layout software (like Quark) uses it as special character, or at least used to, but it surely must be used by only small percentage of Mac users these days. Like you though, it's been over 10 years since I saw it used last (though it's also been 10 years since I used something like Quark or did any print work)!

Re:Good news

[lubricated]

ad hominem ftw. Go moderators.

Re:Good news

[itsdapead]

Geez, that's like saying apple doesn't "do" US keyboards because there's no num lock key.

Nope. The dust lies thick on my num lock key. Having several commonly used (especially when coding) punctuation keys juggled - and one hidden completely - is rather more annoying. Biggest problems with this are (a) Mac Mini: bring your own keyboard - then scour the internet for a correct keyboard definition and find that some applications (Carbon?) helpfully switch back to the Apple layout and (b) switching OSs with Parallels, Boot Camp etc. which have tools for re-mapping alt/apple/command etc. but don't accommodate other differences.

Re:Good news

[poopdeville]

The so-called pilcrow is the "paragraph symbol." The section sign is either two S's, vertically offset, or just an S with a circle in the middle, depending on the typeface.

Re:Good news

[@madeus]

Oh, thanks for the correction. Although I called it a 'section sign' (based on what a search result from Google told me) I actually thought it was refered to as a 'paragraph' delimiter, and that the odd P symbol was an alinea (which it turns out it is, but that's just as synonym).

I wonder if the confusion stems from the way it's been used in some typesetting software (presumabily because while Apple keyboards have a 'section sign' key on then, but not a key with a 'paragraph symbol' printed on it, that they presumably use that for marking paragraphs - that or lots of designers are marking them the most obvious way/the only way they know how).

As I've just learned from Wikipedia not only does the 'section sign' have it's own key on Apple Keyboards, but Alt-6 / Opt-6 does it as well! Madness. About time a petition was started to get rid of the damn key and replace it with something sane. 8.

Re:Good news

[poopdeville]

I've got an Apple keyboard in front of me, and I don't see a section sign. Is this a localization issue? Or did old Apple keyboards have them?

Re:Good news

[@madeus]

I have three Mac's in front of me right now (one with an Apple wired keyboard, one with an Apple wireless keyboard and a macbook) and it's on all of them, just to the left of the 1 key (above the QWERTY row, not the numeric pad).

All are from the UK (which I think use an "International English" layout that isn't quite US but not quite traditional British layout either).

Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[ringfinger]

Having used openoffice, I've made the switch to google docs. I get 80% of the functions with 20% of the hassle. But I'd use open office over MS Office any day if I really needed all the functionality - http://30days.itious.com/

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention having every single thing you write indexed for public consumption and advertising goodness...

google...you seem to apologizing to you girlfriend.
would you like to

1. order flowers
2. seek counseling
3. look up a local escort service

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[wanorris]

Having used openoffice, I've made the switch to google docs. I get 80% of the functions with 20% of the hassle.

I think you mean 20% of the functionality. I am frankly astounded by how few features Google Docs has.

Having said that, if it works for you, more power to you.

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[catbutt]

I'm with you, I'm quite happy with google docs. But I think I get 100% or more of the functionality of MSOffice rather than 80. Sure, 20% of the potentially useful things aren't there, but there are an additional 20+% to make up for it:

• ability to see and edit my documents on anyone's machine without downloading or installing anything
• ability to see all past revisions with incredible ease
• ability to paste all or part of my document into email (gmail, of course), and have the recipient see the formatting exactly as I intended it (generally minor stuff like bold, italic, lists, and occasionally colors to highlight certain things like additions), and without hassling the recipient with attachments in a proprietary format
• ability to put a document on the web so others can see it in about 3 seconds
• ability to generate html that I can paste into a web page that will retain all formatting, since it is composed in html to begin with
• real time collaboration without hassle

I like to use minor formatting in documents (and yes, some emails) to make them more pleasant to read, but generally they don't have to be perfect (or if they do have to look perfect, it is for web presentation), so google docs is perfect for me.

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[catbutt]

What's funny is that there are so many people who will on the one hand say that Google Docs has few features, and on the other can't comprehend why someone would ever need anything other than plain text in an email.

I am one of those who likes to use limited formatting to make what I am writeing easier to read, whether that be in an email or a "document" per se. Google seems to get this. Gmail's formatting in emails is almost identical to google docs.

I'm curious what it is in MSWord that people find so essential, while at the same time curious why so many people in 2007 are happy to communicate without access to even the most basic formatting like bold, italic, indenting and lists when they would help make a cleaner and easier to read presentation.

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[NickFitz]

Hey! That escort service has the same phone number as the girlfriend!

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[Apro im]

Google meets clippy... the horror! The horror!

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[jaavaaguru]

I'm curious what it is in MSWord that people find so essential

The ability to see tracked changes in documents sent to me from other people in the office, customers and partners.
And to be able to see the document almost exactly as they saw it.

Yeah, OO.o does most of this, but not all of the "metadata" makes it through the conversion to ODF.

I prefer to use LaTeX stored in SVN for my own stuff, and also have NeoOffice and MS Office for the aforementioned reasons.

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[feedmetrolls]

You seem to be making a post for Slashdot. Would you like to

1. turn off your computer and get a life
2. seek counseling
3. look up a local escort service

Re:Used it on MacOSX - switching to google docs

[FictionPimp]

I'd like to be able to put page breaks where I want them. So far this has failed to work for me.

REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[Chris_Jefferson]

While this is cool, make sure you really read that warning message. This is real alpha. You won't be able to print. You won't be able to cut+paste reliably. As this alpha has been approaching, I had a crash while saving, leaving me with a half-corrupted useless copy of my document.

So have a look, and help submit bug reports, but please don't try using this is your normal editor, or get annoyed it isn't in a full usable state yet, that's why it is called alpha :)

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[Anonymous Coward]

PLEASE read the parent post throughly - note that you wont be able to print, or copy/paste reliably.

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[jalefkowit]

You won't be able to print. You won't be able to cut+paste reliably.

Finally! An office suite on OS X that works just like OpenOffice does on Linux! ;-)

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[Anonymous Coward]

PLEASE read the parent post throughly - note that you wont be able to print, or #$^$#!%$#$%!!.(***&(&!!!!

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had problems copy/paste to or from OpenOffice.org on Linux.

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[ajs318]

If you don't like copy+paste in X, that is most probably because you are doing it wrong!

To copy text, highlight it by holding down the left mouse button and dragging over it.

To paste it, bring up the screen showing the destination application; hover the mouse pointer somewhere inside the window into which you wish to paste, and depress the scroll wheel without moving it either up or down. (AKA middle-clicking. Also try middle-clicking links in a web browser, if you don't know what it does.) If your mouse has no scroll wheel, then just depress both mouse buttons together and release them together.

Note that these actions are completely universal, as they are part of X itself and not the application (which just thinks the text was typed on the keyboard). If you're into highly advanced stuff, you can even copy and paste between X applications running on different machines. There is no need to disrupt your flow by touching the keyboard or selecting an item from a menu.

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that these actions are completely universal

Wow! So universal that they work on text? And text? And...text? Query: if there's an image in my web browser that I want to copy into the GIMP, how do I do that without saving a copy of it? Since X11's copy and paste mechanism is so universal, I must just select the picture with the left button, switch to the GIMP, and then middle click, right?

Clue: if X11's copy and paste can't do that (the example I just mentioned) consistently with how one copies text, it is AT LEAST 10 years behind any usable windowing system.

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[Anonymous Coward]

well, first off the parent seems like some stupid spammer who just pastes randomly relevant text.
But fact is, I find it really handy to have the X system in addition to KDE and GNOME's object based copy/paste.
Sometimes I really do just want the text, devoid of formatting. And having the select/middle click procedure for basic paste is just incredibly handy. If I want more complex paste I can always explicitly choose it in the GUI or use the keyboard shortcuts.

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[TheRaven64]

The X11 clipboard supports multiple content types, and has from the outset. You do need your sending and receiving programs to agree on a type, however. This is easier on Windows, where there are default types for bitmap (BMP) and vector (WMF) images, and especially for rich test. On X11, there is no standard way of moving rich text around, which is a problem if you use applications written with different toolkits (most toolkits implement their own in incompatible ways).

Oh, and please ignore the grandparent. Like many Linux users, and other people who have never used UNIX on a machine with a real keyboard, they seem unaware that X11 has two methods of copying data (actually, three, but one is not used anymore). These are the copy and select buffers. Meta-C in any application should copy the data to the copy buffer. Selecting data should claim the select buffer. The select buffer is transient, and is intended for very short-lived copy operations. The copy buffer is used for the equivalent operation as copying on Windows or Mac. The select buffer is fairly X11-specific. Since the select buffer is only ever used for data that still exists in the sending operation, only one copy is needed, and it is cheaper to use.

If you are using code written by an idiot, then you will find that Meta-C (which they usually map to control-C) puts something on the select buffer, where it will be easily destroyed.

Re:REALLY READ THAT WARNING MESSAGE

[tverbeek]

In the meantime, you can use NeoOffice.org, which is a mature, stable, and full-featured non-X11 port of OpenOffice to OS X.

Neooffice - differences?

[cyman777]

OK, so I will start the obvious thread:

What are the differences to Neooffice?
Are they working together?

Besides the slow startup I feel Neooffice already has taken that niche, hasn't it?

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[falcon5768]

not using Java to make it work on OS X. and from what I have been able to gather, nope they (as in the dev teams) still wont work together.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[squiggleslash]

This is a genuine native port, NeoOffice uses a Java intermediate layer to present the UI to Mac OS X.

As I understand it, they're not working with the NeoOffice people, there's always been a little friction between the groups.

In time, this project is likely to overtake NeoOffice, simply because changes to OpenOffice.org will always be faster than those in NeoOffice, which is in a continual state of catch-up.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[jj13]

The main difference is that neooffice apparently runs through java on the mac, which is why it takes forever to load and can be very slow on occasion. neooffice is at best a substitute, until a native version is released (which is what is being announced today).

Let me point out something I noticed on the site. I'm a budding mac developer, and in reading the dev FAQ I saw that openoffice is being ported using the Carbon API. This is the old API that apple introduced for developers to more easily port their old OS 9 apps to the "new and shiny" OS X, back when it was actually new and shiny in 2001. Carbon does NOT allow you to take full advantage of OS X features, and it's use is frowned upon for new projects by apple and the dev community.

I'm guessing most of openoffice is written in C++ (never actually looked at the source yet), and Carbon is based in C++ so I'm also guessing they didn't want to rewrite everything in objective-c in order to use Cocoa (the "new" API that is like....7 years old now?). In any case, I'm disappointed that the team isn't going for a more thorough port that will let openoffice shine against the competition. Maybe I should put my keyboard where my mouth is and learn the intricacies of mac porting, hehehe.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Speare]

In time, this project is likely to overtake NeoOffice, simply because changes to OpenOffice.org will always be faster than those in NeoOffice, which is in a continual state of catch-up.

Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"? I'd have to say, Java or no Java, NeoOffice has held the top of the hill for a while now. It may fall behind now (or it may not), but to deny it was out front to this point is just Washington-level spin.

The OOo attitude sounds a lot like those commercials where they claim to be the first, but only by qualifying it with circular trademark references. "PolyCleen(tm) is the first toothpaste with Britenol(tm)." Uh, yeah, because nobody else would include that trademark, even if it's really just baking soda and peroxide.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[squiggleslash]

Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"?

When you start off behind in some areas, but not in others, and in the "others" you can only ever be ahead of the rest. OpenOffice.org's Mac port is at an early stage at the moment, so it implements all of the latest version of OpenOffice.org (by definition) but not all of the Mac native subsystem. NeoOffice includes a complete Mac native subsystem, but not all of the features of the latest version of OpenOffice.org. As time goes by, because making OpenOffice.org native is a discrete, completable, task, OpenOffice.org will catch up with the part of NeoOffice it currently lags behind, but NeoOffice cannot catch up with OpenOffice.org (unless OpenOffice.org ceases to update.)

Does that make sense to you?

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[AttilaSz]

You're wrong. "Carbon" is the collective name for all native Mac OS X APIs, see http://developer.apple.com/carbon/. Quartz, Core Data, Code Audio, etc. are all parts of the umbrella technology set called "Carbon". "Cocoa" OTOH is a handy Objective-C object-oriented abstraction layer atop of that, which is supposed to make development of applications easier. In Windows terms, Cocoa is to Carbon as MFC was to Win32 - an OO encapsulation of the API with convenience goodies. But you can program directly for Carbon if you wish, in the end you have the same capabilities available to your code, it just usually takes less time and lines of code to use Cocoa than Carbon directly. Therefore, it is a perfect solution for you app that you build from scratch. If you're however porting an existing app and it's not trivial to sneak in Objective-C into it, you'd probably go the Carbon route. Nothing to frown upon :-) The misunderstanding comes from Apple's advertized "carbonization" of OS 9 apps ("you need to use Carbon to have your apps run on Mac OS X"). What it really meant was - replace QuickDraw calls with Quartz calls in your source code etc. Carbon is *THE* Mac OS X API, not some transitional support layer for OS 9 migration.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[x_MeRLiN_x]

You misunderstood what the GP was saying. He acknowledges NeoOffice is currently more popular than OpenOffice.org for Mac but NeoOffice is always playing catch-up due to the fact it is a port of OpenOffice.org and they have to wait for changes to the original before converting them over.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[MurrayTodd]

Your description of the Carbon API is partially accurate but in many ways wrong. Carbon WAS created as the migration path for old OS 9 apps (which it did brilliantly) but as the only C++ programming option, it is the de facto standard for anyone who is developing and maintaining ANY cross-platform app, whether it be a Windows/Mac app or Linux/Mac (as is OpenOffice). Adobe uses Carbon for its CS3 suite. Microsoft uses Carbon for Office. Game developers (EA) use Carbon.

And Carbon is updated on a regular basis to reflect new OS features. True, cool APIs like "Core Data" and (I think) Core Animation are Cocoa-only, but some of the newer libraries and technologies coming in Leopard have Carbon interfaces as well. Myself, I would use Cocoa when writing an app but I'd be writing Mac-only applications. If I did want to develop something that was cross-platform, I would probably use Carbon as well.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[LordSchnitzel]

He means that NeoOffice is a fork. The developers began with a snapshot of the source and started modifying it, so updates and fixes to the original have to be incorperated by hand. OO.o OSX is a part of the OO.o project so gets that sort of stuff automatically. Whether or not that makes a difference will depend on how much the core changes, and how often the NeoOffice team update. I get the impression that the core to OpenOffice is pretty good, but the integration with OSX is not, which makes this less of a big deal.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[spud603]

Adobe uses Carbon for its CS3 suite. Microsoft uses Carbon for Office. Game developers (EA) use Carbon
And apple uses Carbon for Finder, a fact that annoys the hell out of me on a daily basis.
Two things off the top of my head that are implemented in Cocoa apps but not Carbon apps: emacs-style text navigation (ctrl-F,ctrl-B, etc) and on-the-fly word definitions (ctrl-cmd-D while cursor is over a word). There are other differences, too, but I only notice them when they don't work in Finder or in Camino (or Photoshop!).
That said, it's a hell of a lot more integrated than Java!

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[LWATCDR]

Not really. Mac Swing was different from other implementations of swing in that it was done in a more "native" way and in c or c++. I doubt any speed issues that NeoOffice felt had much to do with it using the Swing interface. Frankly Swing on the Mac was Java done right IMHO. From what I have heard and I may be wrong Apple isn't putting a lot of effort into Java on the Mac anymore. Which is really too bad.
BTW Carbon and Cocoa are both the "New Api" for OS/X Carbon is the c++ verson and Cocoa is the Objective C version. While I use C++ I have to say that I don't love C++. I have not learned Objective C because currently the only system that really supports it well is OS/X. Bindings for GTK and QT are not mainstream or even exist. Part of the problem is that there isn't a single compiler that does C++ and Objective C so QT bindings are very difficult. GTK would be easier since it is written in c but it is still no walk in the park.
You are kind of correct. If you are going to write code that ONLY runs on a Mac then yes Cocoa is the way to go. If you are going to make it work across multiable platforms or if you are going to leverage existing libraries then you will probably write it in C++ and Carbon. I could be wrong but I think Safari is written in C++ and Carbon.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[itsdapead]

When I first tried it, on a Mac Mini G4, NeoOffice was a bit of a dog.

However, on a decently powerful machine (e.g. Mac Pro) NeoOffice is eminently usable - haven't done any timings (pointless unless you reboot between each test), but I'd say it feels faster than the "release" Mac Oo running under Apple X11. Main issue is that Neo tends to be a point release or two behind Oo so you get a slightly different bugset - and the Neo people are disinclined to waste valuable porting time patching known bugs in the Oo codebase (very sensible, but still annoying if you are being bugged by one of them).

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"?

Simple. NeoOfffice is a port of OpenOffice to run against the OS X (Aqua) libraries. Keyword, "port". A port is by it's very definition "in a continual state of catch-up". If the original project starts to support the target of the port, the port will become superfluous.

It may fall behind now (or it may not), but to deny it was out front to this point is just Washington-level spin.

It never was in front. Period. It was (and is) a *port* of OpenOffice. NeoOffice has never developed any new office features, and it has allways lagged behind OOo running on X on the Mac. Mind you, I'm an avid NeoOffice user. But I'm glad that OpenOffice has decided to add OS X/Aqua as a supported platform. No more waiting for 2 guys to port the changes of hundreds of guys.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[larkost]

You have this almost right...

Many of the sub-systems, especially in things like drawing and sound, often have the more robust API written in Carbon, and then some of the Cocoa API's call those APIs while running. But generalizing like you do that Cocoa is built on Carbon is a mistake, there are many sections of Cocoa that have no Carbon at all underneath them.

A better concept of the major MacOS X API's are that at the root of things you have a layer called CoreFoundation that is written in C. This sits next to the APIs taken from FreeBSD (and the latter dangles down into the Kernel space as well). The primitives from Carbon are often found here, but that is not to say that these belong to Carbon. The primitives found in Cocoa are all built around these, and are often interchangeable with them in some regards.

On top of this you have the "Foundation" layer. This one is mostly written in C or a sub-set of C++ (basically the stuff that does not conflict with Obj-C). Many of the "core" services at the heart of the OS are built here, and at the top of this things start to blur with the bottom of the Carbon layer. Services such as Quartz (but not QuickDraw... which sort-of sits on top of Quartz... but that is messy) sit on this layer.

On top of this layer comes Carbon and Cocoa proper. There is quite a bit of messiness with the two of them calling back and forth, and there are some areas (like Quicktime) that have been very slow to get full implementations in "pure" Cocoa. And a lot more that have had real speed penalties for calling from Cocoa.

Carbon's roots go a little deeper (but less so every new version of MacOS X), but Cocoa and Carbon are philosophically on the same level.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[jj13]

Getting a LITTLE off topic, but thanks to both of the posts clarifying the relationship of Carbon and Cocoa! As I said, I'm the new guy! But a little more quick research finds that a significant enough part of the community has a hard time with the differences as well. A few informative bits here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/05/23/coc oa_vs_carbon.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/ 10/70789.aspx
http://daringfireball.net/2006/10/some_assembly_re quired
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/10/pimp-my-code-pa rt-12-frozen-in.html

I have much to learn!

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[porcupine8]

I'll agree with that. On my work machine (an Intel iMac less than a year old) NeoOffice is actually usable, and no slower than Word.

On my 5-year-old eMac, though, it is positively painful. I hate using it, but Appleworks just doesn't have enough functionality for anything I can't do in TextEdit anyway. I'd put off installing it on my work machine because of its performance at home, but when I finally did (b/c my installation of Office has some strange problems and I can't get the IT guys to reinstall it) I was pleasantly surprised.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[theAtomicFireball]

You're wrong. "Carbon" is the collective name for all native Mac OS X APIs, see http://developer.apple.com/carbon/. Quartz, Core Data, Code Audio, etc. are all parts of the umbrella technology set called "Carbon".

No, no. Actually, you're wrong. Your statement is patently not true. Try this: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/architecture/ind ex.html Cocoa and Carbon are both application frameworks that sit on top of the core foundation, which includes Quartz, Core Data, Core Audio, and Core Video. It's a combination of the old Core Foundation classes from NextSTEP and some ports and rewrites of libraries from the classic mac (e.g. Quicktime), plus a smattering of new OS-X native technologies (e.g. Quartz, Core Video, Core Image). Cocoa is the application building toolset from NextSTEP. Carbon is a re-implementation of the application building toolset that was used under the classic Mac OS. Both are "native", in that neither runs under emulation or using an interpreter, but they are fundamentally different approaches. Both have advantages over the other, although by and large, the consensus is that Cocoa is a much better choice for projects being started from scratch. Cocoa, however, is written in Objective-C, which is a language without as much cross-platform support as C and C++, so projects that came from the classic mac, or those that have been around for some time, can sometimes get running faster using Carbon because they don't have to re-write as much of their legacy C++ code. One commonly misunderstood thing, however, is that these frameworks are not mutually exclusive. Almost all Cocoa applications call Carbon functions; some of the newer Cocoa classes are actually wrappers around Carbon functions. It's much more complicated, but it is actully possible to use Objective-C objects from Carbon, and the CF classes that many Cocoa objects wrap around can always be used from C, just without the benefits of dynamic messaging and weak typing.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Creepy]

They originally disagreed over licensing, now they claim it's much more efficient to just write mac code and not have to coordinate with other platforms - basically, they're saying its easier for them to maintain a fork than it is to coordinate with OOo. The bottom line, however, is NeoOffice code is all GPL, so there is no way for them to legally contribute any of their code to OOo without violating the GPL (unless the original writer submitted it). I don't think OOo is going to move to the GPL, so you've got an impasse.

the "6 year wait" is partly because OOo 1.x was incompatible with MacOS X because of the way symbol bindings were handled (I think it was basically a hack, anyway, exploiting a "feature" in most UNIX-based OSes), so the port really couldn't start until 2.0 (which was heavily rewritten). I was involved in another project when 2.0 came out (I believe STLport, which I think I actually got involved with due to OOo, but X.3 had all the STL features I needed, so I moved on), so I really didn't follow the split that started NeoOffice.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[mezzin]

Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"? I'd have to say, Java or no Java, NeoOffice has held the top of the hill for a while now. It may fall behind now (or it may not), but to deny it was out front to this point is just Washington-level spin

Easy Neoffice works without X11 so OpenOffice needs to catch on with that first and also 100% intergration with osx would be nice like neooffice has (cut and paste with apple keys. als 100% font support like neooiffice. Neooffice is for now the best choice if you want to use openoffice on a mac. But time will tell if OpenOffice will be better.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[zandarthemagnifcent]

perhaps, but Neooffice WORKS. Plus it's zippy, something that really surprised me. Comsidering on how many machines OO refuses to do much more than write half a window for me, I won't be changing anytime soon.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[LKM]

This was probably not your intention, but your post comes off as a bit of a flamebait. Carbon is here to stay, and large parts of Cocoa rely on it. Carbon does allow you to take full advantage of OS X, and in fact, you can even mix Cocoa and Carbon. Nobody (maybe except NeXT fanboys) frowns upon using Carbon.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[diamondsw]

Why is there no moderation "-1 Flat Out Wrong" ?

From the horse's mouth.

Carbon is NOT a fundamental API of Mac OS X. It sits side-by-side with Cocoa, and while it DID start out life as a transitional API from classic Mac OS, it is a peer API of Cocoa. In particular, if you can't deal with Objective-C, you'll likely be using Carbon as it's procedural and accessible from C/C++. Both Carbon and Cocoa are built atop the various "Core" API's. Remember that Mac OS X is a very direct descendent of NeXT, and as late as Rhapsody DR2, there was no such thing as Carbon.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[jafac]

Carbon looks like a safe bet today.

But given Apple's history of deprecating old stuff at every generational change (recent example: Classic is gone since the x86 migration) - if I were developing a new Mac application today, I'd either use a web-services-based approach (like Ruby on Rails, etc.) or I'd use the pure Objective-C/Cocoa, and I'd stay the hell away from Carbon. Because you know damn well, that Carbon is the next thing to go away.

Apple's got some great support for things like Perl, and Python, and PHP, RoR, and especially Java. So it's not like Apple is developer-hostile. I wouldn't say that at all. But after 10+ years using and developing on Macs, you learn to tell which way the wind is blowing.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[ajs318]

OpenOffice.org v1.x was based on a piece of closed-source software, and once you saw the codebase it really shew. The original developers made a whole mountain of schoolboy errors that they just never really expected would see the light of day. Sun opened it up mainly in order to save themselves the effort of rewriting it from scratch in order to make it run on processors with a word length and/or addressing space of anything other than 32 bits (like, for example, a modern SPARC processor in 64-bit mode). Getting StarOffice running on 64-bit SPARC under Solaris meant more to them than preventing StarOffice from running on other architectures under other OSs.

The mess of different licences is unfortunate but necessary. Sun's original in-house-written licence (which allowed Sun to make closed forks of other contributors' code) proved about as popular as a hang-glider with diarrhoea, so they had to re-licence it under the LGPL in order to allow their own closed OpenOffice.org fork (which is also called StarOffice, though it bears little resemblance to the original) to exist. But you can't revoke a copyright licence except by relinquishing copyright in the work; so, as long as there is enough OO.o 1.x code in OO.o for it to be considered a derivative work rather than a new work in its own right which happens to make Fair Use of portions of another copyrighted work, then the SISSL remains in force. The permissions of the GPL are themselves a subset of the permissions of the LGPL, and it's OK to make a GPL fork of an LGPL project (which NeoOffice is).

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[The One and Only]

Another small point about Carbon, to add to the discussion--Carbon is partially based on the old API they were developing for Copland, the modern Mac OS they were trying to develop before Mac OS X came along.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[j-beda]

It never was in front. Period. It was (and is) a *port* of OpenOffice. NeoOffice has never developed any new office features, and it has allways lagged behind OOo running on X on the Mac. Mind you, I'm an avid NeoOffice user.

I thought Neooffice had all sorts of advanced goodness from Novell's ooo-build project such as Excell macros which are not part of OOo running on X on the Mac.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I work with lots of excel macros in Neooffice and it works natively. I can also print. I call that better than openoffice today and now.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[TheRaven64]

The advice from Apple to the OpenOffice.org team was to use Carbon as a bridge between foreign APIs and Cocoa. Carbon is similar to the old MacOS Toolbox APIs, but in recent versions of OS X the two can be used roughly interchangeably; they use the same event loop, so you can handle events with either, which is a huge improvement over the original implementation, and makes moving from Carbon to Cocoa possible on a gradual basis, rather than requiring a complete re-write.

Still, even if Carbon is here to stay, who in their right mind would choose plain C over Objective-C for application development?

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

You're wrong. "Carbon" is the collective name for all native Mac OS X APIs, see http://developer.apple.com/carbon/. Quartz, Core Data, Code Audio, etc. are all parts of the umbrella technology set called "Carbon". "Cocoa" OTOH is a handy Objective-C object-oriented abstraction layer atop of that, which is supposed to make development of applications easier. ...

That's among the most incorrect statements I've ever heard regarding the Carbon/Cocoa setup. Sure, in practice, Cocoa may resemble MFC. But Cocoa and Carbon are at the same level and alternatives.

Also, if "Carbon" is "all native Mac OS X APIs", then how can Carbon apps possibly run on OS 9?

On the other hand, your point is correct. Because Carbon and Cocoa are equal alternatives, you pick the best one depending on how your code is structured. You can get to most interesting OS X APIs via Carbon, so if you're porting existing C/C++ software, Carbon probably makes more sense than Cocoa. (This used to also give you the side benefit of OS 9 compatibility, but frankly, nobody cares anymore.) However, it's incorrect to claim that Cocoa apps use Carbon - Cocoa apps use Cocoa so they don't have to use Carbon.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[tverbeek]

He means that NeoOffice is a fork. The developers began with a snapshot of the source and started modifying it, so updates and fixes to the original have to be incorperated by hand.

It's not quite that bad. The developers of NeoOffice have been careful not to make too many changes that delve into the core of OOo, so they're really just re-attaching the Aqua UI to the front of each new OOo release. There were some pretty long delays back when they were still developing the Aqua toolkit that NeoOffice now uses, but now that it's mostly in place, NeoOffice should be able to keep pace with OOo much more easily. Granted, there will always be a delay between a release of OOo and the corresponding Neo, but I expect them to be much shorter than in the past. And does anyone think that OOo Aqua - when it's stable - is going to have same-day-as-Win-and-Lin releases, either?

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[tverbeek]

I have an old G3 iBook with 320MB of RAM, and NeoOffice 2.0 is rather slow on it. Instead I still have NeoOffice 1.2 installed on it, and although the UI is little clunkier and it's based on the old OOo 1.x code base, it's patched to open the ODF file formats, which is my main requirement. Neo 1.2's hardware requirements are lower, so it runs well enough, and serves me nicely as the portable alternative to my PowerMac G5 (which runs Neo 2.1 just fine).

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there no moderation "-1 Flat Out Wrong" ?

Because moderation is subjective

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[porcupine8]

Actually, I was running 1 for several years until two weeks ago - and cursing it every day for its incredible slowness. After I put 2 on my work computer and it was actually usable, I thought that maybe it was 2 instead of the faster computer, so I installed it here - but no. But 1 was no better.

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[Creepy]

I think Sun mostly opened it up to a) show it was a hardware company and software should be free (as they did with giving away Java a couple of years prior), but also to thumb its nose at Microsoft at not having to pay for 40000+ licenses for Office (if I recall correctly, all Sun employees had a Windows laptop primarily to run Office) and b) as an open source experiment. StarOffice was already being offered as a free download before forming OOo, and it already ran on a portable C++ layer and had been ported to several OS's. I even recall a CD-ROM I got (at JavaOne in 1999?) that had several versions on the same disc - I think Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.

    The original reason for starting to sell the StarOffice variant of OOo was to add fonts, which Sun had to purchase per license. Scott McNealy (I believe) said originally they were going to just sell the font license for a couple of bucks (they may have even done this briefly - I didn't really care at the time), but businesses didn't see value in $2 and wouldn't buy them, so they made the package $70 (apparently they would offer support in either case).

    I fully agree with you that some of the early OOo code I saw was a mess (some was quite good, too), but almost every time I look at an existing codebase I find something that I think is a mess, and I've had other programmers look at my maintained code and think it's a mess (even after I tell them there is a lot of legacy code). Like everyone, I am a victim of deadlines, even in my open source work - if a project I'm on happens to have a release at the same time as I have work crunch, I will often only have time to hack in a solution, and sometimes that hack lives for years before I get around to fixing it properly. I can even think of one in a project I'm working on now, where I set the cwd (current working directory for you non-programmers) and traverse down a hard coded file path rather than using Finder (as long as nothing moves inside a mac .app file, it works fine). The hard coded path was used because file names could be duplicated as long as directory subpaths varied, but there have been a number of messy bugs related to this hack (like datafiles including fixed paths, which is how they were being written by a conversion tool). StarOffice had a lot of legacy code from the original owner, StarDivision, which I believe started as a 1 programmer project in Germany and expanded from there.

Wow!

[sirindex]

Bill Gates was right! Open source software does destroy your data! I'm going back to being sodomized with clippy in my comfort zone now! Goodbye!

Re:Wow!

[Ash-Fox]

Bill Gates was right! Open source software does destroy your data! I'm going back to being sodomized with clippy in my comfort zone now!

I'm sorry.. but... since you were gone for so long... well... Clippy... He's dead...

Re:Wow!

[sirindex]

What has he been replaced with? Stapley?

Re:Wow!

[Ash-Fox]

What has he been replaced with? Stapley?

It calls it self, "The Ribbon".

Re:Wow!

[sirindex]

Heh.

'The Ribbon', strangling idiot users with DRM since January 30, 2007.

Re:Wow!

[MsGeek]

Clippy doesn't really exist in the newest version of Office for Mac, which is Office 2004. You can install Clippy in Office v.X, but the only Office Assistant you get with 2004 is the Mac droid guy which twists itself around like a Rubik's Cube when not in use, and is based on the original Compact Macs.

Even in Office v.X you don't need to have any Office Assistant on the desktop if you don't want one.

Good stuff!

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

My wife had to switch to **brrrr** Microsoft Office on her powerbook because OO.org on the Mac just didn't work for her, being unstable and what have you.

Re:Good stuff!

[charlie]

If you need stability, Neooffice is pretty solid. (It's based on the OOo codebase but using OS/X's Java to provide the UI; it's nicer than the X11 version on OS/X, but relatively slow on pre-intel kit. I've written -- and sold -- a couple of novels using NeoOffice, although I'm currently Switching to Linux (again) ...)

Re:Good stuff!

[DoctorPepper]

My wife uses NeoOffice on her MacBook Pro, and I use it on my old 800 MHz iMac (the little I use the iMac anyway). It is an acceptable alternative to MS Office for the Mac, but not as good IMHO as the native version of OOo I run on my Linux and Windows computers.

I will download and play around with the native port of OOo on my iMac, but I'll leave the wife using NeoOffice until OOo gets out of Alpha status.

Re:Good stuff!

[Citizen of Earth]

It's based on the OOo codebase but using OS/X's Java to provide the UI; it's nicer than the X11 version on OS/X, but relatively slow on pre-intel kit.

But I have heard many times on Slashdot that Java is theoretically faster than C/C++; how could it be too slow to do a good job here?

Neo Office

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.neooffice.org/

A port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X that uses Java as a compatibility layer.

It _is_ production ready (I use it every day).
Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped
wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not
using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work
with others

Re:Neo Office

[GauteL]

"Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped
wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not
using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work
with others "

Licensing. NeoOffice code can not be reused in OpenOffice.org due to their relicensing to GPL from the original LGPL. This is done on purpose from NeoOffice, and the relationship between OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice is that of host and parasite, rather than a symbiotic one.

Re:Neo Office

[DrXym]

Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work with others

They're "hostile" because NeoOffice uses an incompatible licence (GPL only, not LGPL) meaning none of the Neo work can be incorporated back into OpenOffice. So if you want to blame someone, blame the NeoOffice folks. They've shut themselves out, not the other way around.

I think NeoOffice is a decent port, but I've never thought it felt native. Sure some of the widgets look native but the whole thing feels off in some way. Sluggish. If the reason for that is a Java layer then I'd gladly take something that uses native widgets.

OpenOffice itself is no speed demon but NeoOffice seems even slower.

Re:Neo Office

[swillden]

Licensing. NeoOffice code can not be reused in OpenOffice.org due to their relicensing to GPL from the original LGPL.

This is incorrect. The problem isn't GPL vs LGPL, the problem is that Sun requires the copyright for all significant contributions to OpenOffice.org to be assigned to Sun, so they can sell StarOffice as proprietary code. The NeoOffice developers don't want their code sold as proprietary, and don't want to assign their copyrights to Sun.

Re:Neo Office

[constantnormal]

Try the current 2.1 version.

Much faster, although since NeoOffice is code on top of OpenOffice, it's never going to be faster than OpenOffice.

And the extensive use of Java as a wrapper around OpenOffice was only the original version 1. The current NeoOffice has much more Cocoa than Java. I suspect that's where most of the speed improvements have come from.

The best thing to hope for is that as OpenOffice itself becomes more OSX-friendly, NeoOffice will be able to leverage their experience in providing OSX-to-OpenOffice integration on top of a better-performing OpenOffice -- unless the approach Sun is taking in making OpenOffice more OSX-friendly is to wrap the C++ core in java, in which case NeoOffice should hang back with the OO 2.0.4 release and blow the doors off the "OSX-friendly" official version of OpenOffice.

The NeoOffice guys have already travelled that road, and speaking as a user, I wouldn't want to revisit it.

Re:Neo Office

[cunamara]

Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work with others

I use NeoOffice every day for hours each day. It's a polished and effective port of OpenOffice. The reason the OpenOffice.org folks aren't working with the NeoOffice folks is twofold: (1)Not Invented Here and (2) the NeoOffice folks keep finding broken stuff and major limitations in OpenOffice.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

That seems distinctly unfair. Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?" Why, just yesterday there were hundreds of comments to that effect on the GPL2 vs GPL3 story!

It's funny though, because it seems that for all their rhetoric about how using BSD and similarly "non-viral" free software licenses is somehow "more free", BSD/LGPL people generally aren't happy at all when people relicense their code. BSD people hate it when their code gets relicensed, ironically especially when that license is the GPL (for some reason, having their code co-opted by Microsoft or Sun bothers them less -- how does that work?) The LGPL is just like BSD, except that it is exclusively GPL-compatible by design. If it bothers you that someone is releasing mods to your LGPL-licensed program under the GPL, why on earth are you even using the LGPL?

Host and parasite -- god, I love it. Talk about double-speak! It reminds me of this great exchange between an interviewer and Theo de Raadt (whom I have the utmost respect for, as it happens, but this attitude is typical of BSD types):

NF: Lots of hardware vendors use OpenSSH. Have you got anything back from them?

TdR: If I add up everything we have ever gotten in exchange for our efforts with OpenSSH, it might amount to $1,000. This all came from individuals. For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars? Companies such as Cisco, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Siemens, a raft of medium-sized firewall companies -- we have not received a cent. Or from Linux vendors? Not a cent.

Of course we did not set out to create OpenSSH for the money -- we purposely made it completely free so that the "telnet infrastructure" of the 1980s would die. But it sure is sad that none of these companies return even a fraction of value in kind.

If you want to judge any entity particularly harshly, judge Sun. Yearly they hold interoperability events, for NFS and other protocols, and they include SSH implementation tests as well. Twice we asked them to cover the travel and accommodation costs for a developer to come to their event, and they refused. Considering that their SunSSH is directly based on our code, that is just flat out insulting. Shame on you Sun, shame, shame, shame.

I will say it here -- if an OpenSSH hole is found that applies to SunSSH, Sun will not be informed. Or maybe that has happened already.

That's from this interview with Theo at NewsForge if you want to read the whole thing. But basically, there's this tremendously hypocritical attitude among the most ardent supporters of licenses that are presumably "freer than the GPL". I see nothing wrong with the classic BSD/PD stance: "We don't care what you do with it, no matter what we still have the original copy". I think that's a noble way to look at things. It just seems that in practice, that's almost never how it is. Someone turns around and creates something useful from your code and relicenses it in a way that prevents you from benefiting, and suddenly they're evil, even though that's supposedly a right that you expressly wanted to guarantee to them in the first place!

Re:Neo Office

[frogstar_robot]

NeoOffice has submitted patches for problems they've encountered in the OOO codebase (mostly related to file i/o on fileshares). And yes, the patches were offered under Sun's guidelines to be suitable for incorporation to the OOO codebase. OOO has apparently found the source of these bugfixes to be politically incorrect as they still have to fix these whenever they graft their interface on to new OOO releases. IMHO the characterization of the NeoOffice guys as "parasites" is unfair.

Re:Neo Office

[vorpal22]

Just because it is a right doesn't mean that it should be exercised. It's my right on the streetcar in the morning to stay seated and leave a poor, elderly lady who can barely stand up seatless, but it certainly isn't particularly courteous to do so; I don't see how expecting basic courtesy, whether socially or in business interactions, is a bad thing.

Re:Neo Office

[FST777]

When someone takes BSD-licensed code like OpenSSH and releases it proprietary, they may do so. No harm done, "we" still have the original. It is a sign of bad morals when they don't do something back though, and that may be said. Which is exactly what Theo did.

Furthermore, when there is a bug in the original code, it is certainly not up to the devs of that code to inform all the deriatives. That would be funny: someone takes your hard work, does nothing in return and people still expect that you take responsibility for that.

BSD is like: here you are, do what you want, as long as you give credit. It would, however, be extremely nice when there is something done in return, for example financial support. This would create a certain symbiose: Sun makes SunSSH, and gives credit and finances to OpenSSH, so that OpenSSH can continue to improve while SunSSH can use those improvements.

What Theo said was this: sure they can use it, but I find it sad that they won't return any favor. He is completely right with that statement.

If OpenSSH was released under the GPL or even the LGPL, either telnet would still be the #1 app for remote control or a myriad of proprietary protocols would exist for that.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

That's certainly true, but in the real world, it's never as simple as that. To extend your analogy somewhat: suppose that you were sitting on the bus and noticed a poor, elderly lady who can barely stand up without a seat. It occurs to you that the right thing to do would be to get up and give her your seat. The problem is, right next to you a large, tattooed gentleman who benches 400 is eagerly waiting for you to give up your seat. Unlike you, he has no sense of decency and will not hesitate to push the old lady out of the way to take your seat as you leave it. Do you still stand, knowing that the old lady will not get the seat in any case?

See, companies compete with each other by their very nature. If a selfless BSD developer makes a useful piece of software, and company A decided to use it in their own product, they are faced with a choice: release the improvements they made back to the BSD developers, thus allowing their competitors to benefit from their hard work without any guarantee that their competitors will likewise make their changes available, or keep their improvements proprietary?

It's not that the company doesn't want to give back to the community, it's that they don't want to benefit their competitors unless they know with certainty that their competitors will return the favor. Unless everyone is an altruist -- and when there's strong financial incentive to not be altruistic, the likelihood of that is slim -- the "trust people to do the right thing" attitude is not going to get you very far, because it's not simply a question of doing the right thing, it's also a question of whether or not doing the right thing will hurt you (by giving your competitors an advantage).

In case my original post didn't emphasize it enough, I see nothing wrong with the BSD license, and I think that if you're truly not bothered by people using your code and not giving back, then it may be the license for you. My point (and it stands) is that most people are not "truly not bothered" by such behavior. For companies, releasing code under the BSD license is a gift not just to the community, but to their competitors. Even if they were happy to give code back to free software developers, they'd be stupid to give code to their competitors, who more likely than not never do the same.

Re:Neo Office

[nanosquid]

Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?"

I have released under BSD, GPL, and LGPL. When I picked BSD, I did so for practical reasons, like to encourage companies to use the code with less fear. Nevertheless, I strongly prefer for those companies to contribute back. Legally, I have no way to force them, but I'll certainly tell people in no uncertain terms what I think of them if they don't. Likewise, when I pick the BSD, I do so for good reasons, and relicensing the code under the GPL undermines those reasons, which is why I certainly will tell people who do that in no uncertain terms what I think of them.

In different words...

The BSD license is a license that relies on people to behave reasonably voluntarily; if they don't, you have every right to complain, even if you can't do anything legally about it.

The GPL license is a license that tries to force people to behave reasonably through legal obligations; if they don't, you don't just complain, you go to court.

Re:Neo Office

[trifish]

creates something useful from your code and relicenses it in a way that prevents you from benefiting

BSD does not allow relicensing (i.e. changing the license terms). It only does not enforce itself on all parts of the derived work.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

I think you're missing what I'm saying, which is not that Theo is in the wrong (he's not). I personally find Sun's attitude reprehensible; I think you'll find that most free software advocates feel exactly the same way, which is why most of them opt to license their code under the GPL: it makes the "I'll scratch your back and then you'll scratch mine" expectation explicit. In this particular case, licensing OpenSSH under the GPL may not have been advisable, because the stated goal of the OpenBSD team was to have ssh replace telnet and rsh as standard, and as even RMS admits, the BSD license is superior to the GPL and friends when this is your goal. But this is not the only example of BSD types complaining when their code is relicensed, it's just a recent one I was able to find easily. Others abound.

The thing that I was commenting on was that this expectation that people who use our code do right by the community is exactly what BSD proponents routinely lambaste us for. "It's not true freedom to force people to give back to the community," they say. "People should be able to do whatever they want with the code," they say. All good and noble, except that, as I pointed out, that's often not how they really feel. They go out of their way to guarantee this completely antisocial freedom to the users of their code, and then complain when that freedom gets exercised.

I'm not demanding that BSDers move to the GPL; I understand the philosophy of the two movements are different. But I think that many people who describe themselves as BSD fans are doing so out of a sort of misguided libertarian ideal rather than a true deep-seated alignment with the BSD license's philosophy of freedom. They think to themselves: the BSD license has less restrictions than the GPL, ergo it is more free! I am a friend of freedom, so I will support BSD! But freedom is not so easily quantifiable: the question of which society is more free, a society which condones murder or one which prohibits it is applicable here. It comes down to a fundamental question which cannot easily be answered: which is more fundamental, the freedom to murder or the freedom not to be murdered? Admittedly, murder is an extreme example (slavery is another common one used to illustrate this point that is no less divisive) but the underlying philosophical quandary is important: the freedom to do something that affects someone else is intrinsically inversely related to the freedom not to be affected by that act. The freedom to follow me home is related to my freedom not to be stalked by strangers -- if society guarantees your freedom to stalk me, you are more free but I am less free. It is clear, then, that a balance must be reached.

BSD and GPL take different stances; neither is objectively right. It depends on your personal convictions.

My observation, though, is that many people in the BSD crowd do not seem to actually truly believe in the BSD's ideals. Or, put another way, they are opportunistic in their beliefs. It's like loudly advocating the right to murder and then condemning the actions of a man who murders your son. I have no problem with the condemning of the man who murders your son, as I do not condone murder; but it seems hypocritical for you to take the same stance, if you have been going on and on about how murder should be acceptable.

In this case, not giving back to the community is the "murder" in question, Theo is the man who has vocally advocated the right to "murder" (not give back to the community), and he is the one complaining when his son (OpenSSH) is murdered by Sun (used without compensation). I (who do not condone "murder") empathize completely with Theo's predicament and think it is horrible that Sun acts the way they do. At the same time, however, I cannot help but notice the hypocrisy of his stance, which seems to condemn murder only when it affects him.

As an aside, you said "BSD is like: here you are, do what you want, as long as you give credit." This is not in fact the case and hasn'

Re:Neo Office

[Goaway]

You're ignoring the very real benefit of releasing your changes back to the original developers so they can incorporate it into future releases, taking the burden of maintaing a fork off you.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

In practice there is no difference. From the perspective of a user, the BSD is essentially the same as public domain with the added statement that the code comes with no warranty, not even the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. I can take the code and release it under a new license. This does not prevent you from getting it under the terms of the BSD license, so if I have made no changes there's really no point -- but if I do make changes, add functionality, etc, and license those changes under a different, more restrictive license, you cannot benefit unless you accept the terms of that new, more restrictive license. The result is therefore the same.

Re:Neo Office

[FST777]

I would release software I've written under the GPL any time. But sometimes (OpenSSH, FreeBSD) it might be more reasonable to release it under a less restrictive license.

Thing is: BSD and GPL define what might be done with the source. It's not so much that BSD is about total freedom, it's about giving away the right to close the source. GPL restricts that.

I agree with you when someone stands up and shouts at the person who actually closes the source. They are just using their rights. But that is not the point I tried to make: if someone takes the code, closes it and earns (lots of) money with it, it's not unreasonable to expect a donation (as a token of appreciation and as a push to get better versions in the future). It might even be called immoral not to give a donation (accepting a present without saying: "gosh, thanks!").

We all like to be thanked for our work. GPL demands thanks. BSD leaves it up to the user. Both complain when thanks are not received, the BSD crowd vocally in disappointment and the GPL crowd in court (whenever able). That is the real difference.

Re:Neo Office

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by "BSD/LGPL people"?
  LGPL is an FSF license and also has copyleft, and I guess "BSD people" don't like it (so it does have other differences from BSD than being "exclusively compatible with the GPL"). "LGPL people" want copyleft and wouldn't agree with BSD. I think you're conflating the two licenses to score points against a strawman.

BSD people hate it when their code gets relicensed, ironically especially when that license is the GPL (for some reason, having their code co-opted by Microsoft or Sun bothers them less -- how does that work?)

You can't relicense code - the copyright always stays unless it's public domain.

Learn what you're talking about, *then* post.

Re:Neo Office

[trifish]

I can take the code and release it under a new license.

Again, you are wrong. BSD does not permit relicensing. The copyright holder would have to assign his or her copyright to you. Only then you would be allowed by law to "release it under a new license".

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

Well, that really depends on how much control you want over the code you've appropriated and how much you fear your competitors will benefit from your (possibly substantial) modifications. There are certainly cases where proprietary vendors have voluntarily released some of their modifications back to the community for (probably) precisely that reason. Apple's relatively synergistic relationship with the Darwin/FreeBSD community might be a good example, although I've heard a lot of complaints there, too.

Otherwise, though, you have to admit that this so-called "burden" of maintaining a fork has not historically been enough of a burden to coerce vendors into releasing modifications back to the community -- generally they just quietly incorporate the BSD code into their products. Look at the splintering of UNIX back in the 80s and 90s, with every vendor offering his or her own incompatible version, often based on BSD code. Look at Microsoft's use of the BSD TCP stack. I mean, really, examples abound, and these are only ones we know about. There's very little "giving back", and BSD development has historically been in spite of companies, not thanks to them.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

You're being needlessly pedantic, and quoting me out of context. When I say "release the code under a new licence", what I mean (and that's why I prefaced my post with "In practice") is that you redistribute some portion of the BSD licensed code (under the BSD license, of course) along with key modifications under your own, more restrictive license. Certainly, the portions that were previously under the BSD license remain so, but in practice this is an irrelevant point because even if that weren't the case, you could still get the original from the original BSD developers under the BSD license.

So, it stands to reason that if you are getting my code from me and not from them, you are interested in my modifications, which you cannot use without accepting my more restrictive license (only on my code, sure, but my code is useless without the BSD code that accompanies it). Technically you must accept both licenses, but since the BSD license places no restrictions on you and allows me to redistribute the BSD-licensed code along with my more restrictive non-BSD licensed modifications, it is as though the entire package were under my more restrictive license. In practice.

Of course, I think you understand exactly what I'm saying, but are harping on details because you think it makes a difference. Because the BSD license (sans advertising clause, of course) does not restrict my redistribution of the code or of derivative works in any way whatsoever and only requires that I waive some implied warranties as a prerequisite, combined with the fact that in the US at least a copyright license cannot be retroactively revoked by the copyright holder unless the right to revoke said license is explicitly outlined in the license (which is not the case in the BSD license, which explicitly waives all rights), the fact that the code "cannot be relicensed" is, in practice, completely irrelevant.

Re:Neo Office

[trifish]

You're being needlessly pedantic

You know, law and licensing is like that. Every word, even one that might seem silly to you, actually matters.

Re:Neo Office

[trifish]

> which is not the case in the BSD license, which explicitly waives all rights

Another complete nonsense (especially the emphasized word). Waiver of all rights is public domain. BSD means all intellectual property rights are fully retained (not waived) but some permission is granted is to use the work in certain ways.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

I am commenting on a broader theme; a straw man is when you decline to argue with what a person has actually stated and instead argue with what you wish they had stated. I think I was pretty clear about that. The LGPL differs from the GPL in precisely one respect: the LGPL explicitly allows other programs to link with it, either statically or dynamically, without requiring that this new, arguably "derivative" work, also be licensed under the GPL. This is completely different than the BSD license, which I know full-well. (Given this, one wonders what the point of releasing an application under the LGPL is.)

However, in this context, the overall situation is similar, because it happens frequently that people who are not fond of the GPL's "viral" nature advocate the use of BSD or LGPL (in the case of libraries) instead. Both of these do not prohibit an author of a GPL'd application from incorporating code into his GPL-licensed work. Of course said code does not magically get a new license, nor do the copyrights get magically transfered to the author of the derivative work -- when I used the term relicense, this is not what I was claiming. It was, perhaps, a poor choice of words, but its a common idiom in these sorts of discussions precisely because the effect is the same as relicensing in practice: sure, you can still obtain your own code under your own license from me if I distribute it, but why would you want to? You already have your own code under your own license. What you want is my code, but you don't want it under the GPL. I can use your BSD or LGPLd licensed code in a derivative work, and release my modifications under the full GPL -- but you cannot do the same with my work (take my modifications and redistribute them as part of a derivative work that is not licensed under the GPL).

Claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about because you've parsed the word "relicense" in a needlessly pedantic way is silly and makes me wonder if you have any truly meaningful arguments to bring to the table. You know, the kind that address my point, and not just a footnote.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

That would be true if we were discussing law, but we're not (or at least, I wasn't.) I was discussing the attitudes of BSD fans versus the attitudes of GPL fans, and I was pointing out an apparent hypocrisy in the attitudes of some members of the former group when a freedom they consider key is actually exercised. Turning this into an argument about legal terminology -- especially when my meaning was completely clear -- is not productive at all.

To respond to your sibling post, copyright (as far as I know, but I am not a lawyer) covers the right to copy (ie, distribute), hence its name. A copyright license outlines under what circumstances a licensee may distribute a work, either in its entirety, or in part. Fair use notwithstanding, this includes the right to include a work in another, derivative work.

The BSD license explicitly grants you an irrevocable right to redistribute the work, under any circumstance, whether in whole or in part, whether independently or as part of a derivative work. The rights normally associated with the copyright holder -- the right to control distribution, etc -- have all been passed to the licensee, with the exception of the right to transfer copyright or relicense the work. But neither of those matter in practice, as I said, because all the rights normally associated with the copyright holder are guaranteed by the BSD license to the licensee! So what if you get to put © 2007 Trifish by the code? What rights does that give you in practice? And what about the right to relicense? So you have the exclusive right to actually change the licensing terms on your code, but how is that worth anything? Anyone can redistribute the code you previously released under the BSD license along with their (proprietary) modifications, and you can't revoke that right from them, so all you can really do (in practice) is change the license on your own modifications! Sure, you've relicensed all the code, but modulo the modifications, all that code is also available under the BSD license because you released it under that license already and cannot revoke it!

So let me ask you again: what meaningful rights (and by meaningful, I mean allow you to do something that a licensee cannot do) does the BSD license reserve?

Because otherwise, it sure seems like it waives all rights. All meaningful ones, anyway.

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

I think we basically agree. I don't really think its fair, though, to explicitly emphasize how users of your license are under no obligation to thank you, and then turn around and complain when they don't.

Of course I agree that they should thank you, though.

Re:Neo Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Your original post is a strawman because you're lumping together two separate approaches and than charging each of them with hypocracy based on statements they did not made, but rather the other group you're lumping them with.

A) You've written:

Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?" Why, just yesterday there were hundreds of comments to that effect on the GPL2 vs GPL3 story!

But "LGPL people" do care if someone made their code proprietary, which is why they released the code under LGPL, and not BSD! The "hundreds of comments to that effect" came from BSD people, and the "LGPL people" were, if anything, opposing them! So you're accusing the LGPL camp of hypocracy based on statements from another camp, the BSD camp.

B) you've written:

It's funny though, because it seems that for all their rhetoric about how using BSD and similarly "non-viral" free software licenses is somehow "more free", BSD/LGPL people generally aren't happy at all when people relicense their code. BSD people hate it when their code gets relicensed, ironically especially when that license is the GPL (for some reason, having their code co-opted by Microsoft or Sun bothers them less -- how does that work?) The LGPL is just like BSD, except that it is exclusively GPL-compatible by design. If it bothers you that someone is releasing mods to your LGPL-licensed program under the GPL, why on earth are you even using the LGPL?

But this story is about "LGPL people" being angry that people relicensed a fork with GPL. Maybe our imaginery "BSD-openoffice" wouldn't be angry at all about the GPL fork. You're imputing hypocracy on the BSD camp based on statement by "LGPL people", which they may not agree with at all. Note that contrary to your statement the LGPL is viral if the GPL is, as the only difference is the linking exception - you're again imputing a statement from "BSD people" on the "LGPL people".

C) Quoting Theo De Ratt being a jerk doesn't prove anything, except the sun still shines in the east, the sky being blue. and the world keeps turning as it always does.

Re:Neo Office

[Goaway]

Of course, had that code been GPL, none of those companies would have touched it, and would have implemented their own, quite possibly worse code. In the end, everybody still benefitted.

Re:Neo Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that contrary to your statement the LGPL is viral if the GPL is, as the only difference is the linking exception - you're again imputing a statement from "BSD people" on the "LGPL people".

To rewrite this in a more clear manner: if the GPL is viral, than the LGPL is also viral, as including LGPL code makes the entire codebase turn LGPL (or be illegal). If the LGPL people opposed "viral licenses" they wouldn't have released under the LGPL!

Re:Neo Office

[Anonymous Coward]

if the GPL is viral, than the LGPL is also viral, as including LGPL code makes the entire codebase

Unless you obey the terms of the license and link against it like you're supposed to (you know, use the library as a library, imagine that!) rather than including it in your code.

If you're talking about making changes to a library because it doesn't do what you want, I take it you're driving a honda that you bought then ripped out the engine, the seats, the console, the fenders, the body, the chassis, and the wheels and replaced them all with ferrari parts, right? After all, actually buying a ferrari would be beneath you, when you could have just bought a honda and made it into a ferrari?

Re:Neo Office

[808140]

That's what you would think, but historically, that hasn't been the case. It depends a lot on what said companies want to do with the code. Obviously, if it's code that they intend to distribute as a key component of their main product, then they probably won't GPL it. But in those cases, they wouldn't provide it under the BSD license, either, for the same reason.

No, the interesting situations happen when, as you said, they don't really want the burden of maintaining a fork. In those situations, they are more likely to contribute code under the GPL because they know that their competitors cannot benefit from their improvements without likewise contributing. This is not me hazarding a guess, either: there is unprecedented corporate involvement in free software development these days, and almost exclusively on GPL'd projects. There are more corporate developers working on the Linux kernel now than there are hobbyists, apparently, and that's just one example. FreeBSD, on the other hand, despite having an arguably technically superior kernel, benefits from very little corporate support, and is written mainly by hobbyists (there is nothing wrong with this, it's not a value judgement -- corporate involvement is a double edged sword, and I'm wary of it).

But the concern that we outlined earlier -- that my competitor stands to benefit from my improvements to a BSD project without any sort of guarantee that I'll benefit in turn -- is mitigated by the GPL, which is why companies seem so much more willing to contribute to GPL'd projects. Sure, my competitor can use my improvements, but if he improves on my improvements, he cannot keep them from me. So in a sense, everyone pays, and no one gets to leech.

Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not advocating the GPL over the BSD license. I completely respect your right to use that license, and I very much respect the spirit of the license. However, because altruism cannot be guaranteed, companies are wary of contributing to BSD-licensed projects (even if they are not wary of using code provided under that license). It's important to understand that, going in to the licensing decision, and it's important to carefully examine your own goals for your project. If your goal is to encourage hobbyist and corporate collaboration, the BSD license will probably not have the desired effect, unfortunately.

If your goal is to "raise the bar" as it were on code quality over all, releasing high quality libraries and applications under the BSD license is the way to do it. But you must be a realist and understand that people are probably not going to give back to your project. If you truly don't expect that, you have my unwaivering support. Just don't complain when no one gives back, because experience has shown that they won't.

Re:Neo Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's what the term "viral" means (code reuse relicenses target). Furthermore, there are cases when you want to use LGPL code not via linking:
a) When the library is too bloated, you may want to pull the code into your app.
b) Dynamic linking is not an option sometimes.
c) When the LGPL license is used with an application, as in OpenOffice's case**, than all the standard reasons apply.

** A guess why this is the case:
  a. The OpenOffice project must use the LGPL for some libraries distributed with OpenOffice in order to let StarOffice use these libraries, otherwise Sun will pull its support.
  b. Some code may well be duplicated between the binaries and the libraries - OpenOffice was a complete mess when it was open-sourced. If the binaries were GPL, it would have made it difficult to import fixes to the libraries (did that patch originate in the GPL'd binary? Would applying it to the LGPL library make it "deriative" and thus GPL?). Thus the OpenOffice project chose to LGPL the binaries as well, to avoid this issue.

Re:Neo Office

[trifish]

That would be true if we were discussing law, but we're not (or at least, I wasn't.)

So if you say, for example, "copyright", it may mean something else than what is meant when discussing law? If you say the word "relicense" or "release under a new license" it only means one thing, no matter what you believe it means (or what you believed it meant).

When I informed you that you don't know the meaning of the word relicense and that you incorrectly believed that BSD = public domain, you tried to offend me (as being too pedantic). I'm done with this thread. I'm sure you now know what "to relicense" means, so I hopefully wasn't wasting my time completely.

Released?

[reality-bytes]

You know, "released" when applied to software commonly means software which is considered (rightly or wrongly) to be 'production' material.

This however is apparently an 'alpha' which is commonly an early development version, not fit for general consumption and the type of thing you might get from CVS or a daily tarball.

Some developers use the term 'alpha release' as they assume others will know it's just a packaged up development snapshot, then some muppet takes it and runs to press with it.

Re:Released?

[Anonymous Coward]

Public alpha?

Re:Released?

[drinkypoo]

Some developers use the term 'alpha release' as they assume others will know it's just a packaged up development snapshot, then some muppet takes it and runs to press with it.

Yes, and that muppet put the word "alpha" in the title of the story submission for a reason, or so I assume.

Only missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Printing, PDF export and Copy/Pase.

Is it just me? or what is it good for?

Warning!

[Rob T Firefly]

'WARNING: This software may crash and may destroy your data Do not use this software for real work in a production environment.

Do not taunt Happy Fun Software.

Re:Warning!

[CockroachMan]

'WARNING: This software may crash and may destroy your data Do not use this software for real work in a production environment. Windows should have one of those in the box..

Slashdot.org for truthiness released!

[subreality]

Nearly 10 years after announcing spysat pixels for sale, Slashdot.org has released the first release of Slashdot with unbiased truth that can finally run without slant! An alpha is available for viewing today, but a lot of help is still needed to make Slashdot more truthy. The site is very blunt: 'WARNING: THIS SITE MAY CONFUSE THE MEANING OF ALPHA AND RELEASE. DO NOT READ THIS SITE IF YOUR BRAIN IS USED FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. This is an alpha test version so that Linux fanboys and OSX users can get way too excited and blow things entirely out of proportion, and make comments on how to improve profit.' Currently missing functionality includes critical thinking, peer review, spellcheck, and multiple opinions. That said, if you're interested in participating you can sign up for an account to figure out how you can start trolling today.

Re:Slashdot.org for truthiness released!

[subreality]

With apologies to no one, some comic relief was needed after that much excitement over an early alpha. Seriously, editors, please try to get some perspective. The unending slant gets old.

Re:Slashdot.org for truthiness released!

[Timesprout]

LOL Excellent post!

How does it perform?

[bogaboga]

I wonder whether this Mac version is any better at loading. Versions for Windows and especially Linux get a failing grade on this issue. Sadly, very few folks see this as an important issue.

Re:How does it perform?

[MachineShedFred]

Well, it can't possibly load any slower than Office 2004 on an Intel Mac. Carbon MS bloat + rosetta = crap.

Least of Their Worries

[whisper_jeff]

Currently missing functionality includes printing, pdf export, copy/pasting...

If someone uses the alpha, with these limitations, in a production environment, then crashing will be the least of their worries...

Still, I'm damn glad to see the (real) Mac version is finally moving forward. It'll be nice to switch when it's out of testing.

Re:Exclamatory!

[Le Marteau]

Yeah, I saw the exclamation mark in the title and before even reading which editor posted it, I immediately guessed Zonk. He is exactly well-versed in proper journalistic practices, to put it kindly.

Vista

[Ramble]

So we can expect the Vista native WPF version very soon eh?

Thanks to neooffice...

[MMC Monster]

Just wanted to give a thanks to the folks behind neooffice (http://www.neooffice.org/) before all the bashing starts...

Don't worry about that

[matt me]

I'm sure we can count on Slashdot readers to submit reliable bug reports.. Like bugzilla.mozilla doesn't drop requests with slashdot.org as referer.

Re:Don't worry about that

[csnydermvpsoft]

Like bugzilla.mozilla doesn't drop requests with slashdot.org as referer.

They don't do that because of poor quality bug reports from Slashdot users. They block requests with slashdot.org as the referer to discourage Slashdot contributers from posting direct links to bugzilla pages, which would crash the server.

They shouldn't have announced this yet.

[Slashcrap]

Because I bet that 98% of Mac OO users have already switched to this Alpha version. The fact that it can't print, can't copy & paste and will certainly crash and destroy their work is surely secondary to the fact that it looks better than the standard version.

Stupid Title!

[NPN_Transistor]

IMO, the title of this article is very misleading.

OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Released!

To me, this implies that a version of OpenOffice that I could actually use for work has been released for OSX. Hell, the whole reason I read this article is because I thought it was, and that this would have been a breakthrough of sorts. An alpha version that should not be used for "real work in a production environment" isn't what I had in mind. According to the web site, you can't even print or copy and paste! This is merely a small step forward for OpenOffice being ported to OSX since the only significant change is the removal of the need to have an X server installed to run.

Re:Stupid Title!

[gradix]

I agree, this a fake title...

warning

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning: this software may crash and may destroy your data do not use this software for real work in a production environment. ooh sounds cool. Just like my ms office. I'd probably be confy right away when using this.

License

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides the technical differences (Java/Carbon), a big difference is the licenses: OpenOffice.org is LGPL, NeoOffice is GPL. That means that code can flow from OpenOffice to NeoOffice, but not vice versa since the NeoOffice devs don't want anything less than GPL for their code. (I think both the NeoOffice devs used to work for Sun and maybe they got stomped on one too many times - end result, they don't want Sun re-licensing their code and making commercial cash off their work.)

Finally!

[coleopterana]

We dug all the MS office products (and 'test drive' nonsense) out of the Mac mini we got for my grandmother but the X11 requirement for OO is a problem if she accidentally closes it. This was my first major experience with a Mac since middle school and honestly, things are just not as simple as they want you to think they will be, especially if you have the Intel processors.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quiet! Macs are easy, stop spreading FUD.

sensational

[gwoodrow]

As in... sensationalistic, no? "OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Released! OMG! LOL! WTF?" Except that it barely works yet. "It only displays words in binary or wingdings... no actual text yet. Also, it may give you dysentery." These slashdot headlines sure are knee-jerk excited over the smallest things.

And just to go ahead and respond to the obligatory joke: no, I am not new here. I just have a really, really bad memory. :)

Re:A Massive Waste Of Resources

[BruthaMyles]

You are John C. Dvorak and I claim my £5

Not Alpha

[Doc Ruby]

"Alpha" testing is testing by people who participated in the design and/or implementation. Any testing by people not in those teams is, by definition, "Beta" testing.

Alpha/Beta/Release is not a measure of quality or maturity. It just tells who is testing, and their relationship to the software.

Re:Not Alpha

[shawnce]

Actually in many schools of thought those levels have everything to do with quality and completeness.

Alpha = feature incomplete software with bugs, Beta = feature complete software with bugs, Release = feature complete software with ideally very few bugs.

Re:Not Alpha

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I call BS. Didn't you follow the Vista release cycle?

Re:Not Alpha

[bill_mcgonigle]

Alpha = feature incomplete software with bugs, Beta = feature complete software with bugs, Release = feature complete software with ideally very few bugs.

Yes, everywhere I've ever created or tested software these were the definitions. 'Release' these days typically means, "feature complete software with as many bugs fixed as we plan to fix."

Re:Not Alpha

[dyftm]

In my experience, that's just not true. Take Mozilla, who have released/are releasing alpha versions of the next version of Gecko. I frequently test them and I'm most definitely not involved in design and/or implementation (and I'm not alone in that).

Re:Not Alpha

[Doc Ruby]

You're saying some thing circular. You are testing Betas. Alpha is the word we use for the very different category of SW that is being tested by only people in the design/implementation team/s.

Instead, those terms are being used wrong to describe a degree of quality, in terms of project progress, which makes the project (and its products) less manageable, less predictable by its consumers.

Re:Not Alpha

[Doc Ruby]

Can you give me an example project?

FWIW (a lot), that way of controlling projects doesn't work, mainly because plenty of bugs can be fixed only with features. Gating releases on who's testing it does work.

Still needs X11

[AttilaSz]

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac page says:

In order to run the OpenOffice.org you need to have X11 installed.

Okay, so it allegedly doesn't use X11, but you still need to have it installed? I can see how this is a cheap way of getting around crashes because they forgot to remove some X11 dependency, and it's actually acceptable for alpha software, but it's still really, truly far from elegant...

Re:Still needs X11

[TheBig1]

That's for the stable version, which has always been used via X11. This announcement is for an alpha version, which does not require X11.

Cheers

Re:Still needs X11

[TrentC]

Okay, so it allegedly doesn't use X11, but you still need to have it installed?

That's because you're looking at the page for the existing OOo X11 port.

The actual page for the Aqua port says nothing about requiring X11.

Klingon software releases

[cerberusss]

You know, "released" when applied to software commonly means software which is considered (rightly or wrongly) to be 'production' material.

What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake!

NeoOffice works.

[SanityInAnarchy]

There are other differences that I'm sure others will point out, but for now, NeoOffice works and is reasonably stable, although dog-slow -- but what do you expect from OpenOffice?

The native OpenOffice port, from what they are telling me, is very much alpha quality right now.

neo office is not quite release quality

[bigtrike]

I've only used it once, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to unfreeze panes in their Excel clone. It doesn't seem to be in any of the menues. In addition, the word "freeze" does not even appear in their documentation. I was able to do this very routine task in OpenOffice (via x11) without much trouble.

Re:neo office is not quite release quality

[constantnormal]

Uh... try the Window:Freeze menu item. It's been there from Day 1, and has always worked -- at least in my experience.

NeoOffice is is of EXCELLENT release quality.

Re:Huh wha?

[xtal]

Latex might provide better rendering results than terminal. Pico away, however! ;)

ahem...

[djupedal]

I know the boys have been busy and all, but can someone at least inform them that Apple dropped the word 'Computer' from their name recently?

And no, I'm not going to offer to help - I tried that back in 2000, and they couldn't find their collective asses without directions...

Not exactly 'released'

[Random BedHead Ed]

While a native OS X version of OpenOffice.org is a great thing, the title of TFA is a bit misleading. This software hasn't exactly been 'released' in the normal sense of the word. It would have been more accurate to say 'Alpha build of OpenOffice.org for OS X released!' (Yes, technically the exclamation point is not inaccurate, so I left it in.) Being an alpha build it has a number of odd qualities, including but not limited to the following:

• It can't print
• It can't export to PDF properly
• It can't always do that fancy 'copy and paste' thing
• It will crash when closing

Again: good, but alpha.

Why?

[edesjardins]

Look, I know I don't even have any karma to burn and this may start some flames, but... Why? What's the point of this? The Microsoft Office Student/Teacher edition can be purchased readily from Apple's online store for $149 for the full version of Office. If you can't afford $149 for your productivity either:

A) Your time isn't worth any money and you should reconsider what you're using it for
B) You can't afford it, so how can you afford the computer that you're using
C) You just have no desire to pay for software and/or hate Microsoft for XYZ reasons.

Obviously all of those items are problems, but for the price and how good Office is for the Mac, I think it's quite a value. Besides, "free" is relative, this is alpha software that's 5 years AT BEST behind Microsoft Office. I think that Google's Apps are much more promising as a Microsoft competitor than a buggy copy-cat of what you can already get for a relatively low cost.

Flame on.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the Student/Teacher edition has some restrictions on what you can do with what you produce (i.e. you can't make any money off it). So if you want to do anything other than turn in homework you're stuck paying the full price for Office. *That* is part of why this is a big deal. The other part is that Open Office is just good software and it will be nice to have a native OS X version.

Re:Why?

[Zelos]

Not everyone can buy the student/teacher version though, can they? I thought it required proof of being a student/teacher. The normal price of Office Mac is around $300, which is expensive enough to make people look elsewhere - it's half the price of a budget Mac, after all.

Re:Why?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why? What's the point of this?

The point is to provide a free, standard application for word processing that will work on all platforms.

The Microsoft Office Student/Teacher edition can be purchased readily from Apple's online store for $149 for the full version of Office.

So that is about $50 a year, per person, given the average upgrade cycle. Assume you're running a school or business. Is that a significant amount of money? If you're running a school, how can you assure that all students both at home and in the lab can have access to the same version of a word processor, or at least one that is compatible with the same file format? Is it reasonable to require all parents to spend that amount of money simply so their kids can use a compatible word processor? Wouldn't it make more sense if there was a free word processor that everyone could keep up to date (since it costs nothing to do so) and which you could be assured would work with all your files regardless of which version created them? What if your school has a few Linux labs? There is no version of MS Office for Linux. How can you assure those students can be compatible?

Your time isn't worth any money and you should reconsider what you're using it for

A lot of people, including students and people in less wealthy countries find that $50 is worth a lot of time (weeks of work for some of them) and why are you assuming MSOffice will save time over OpenOffice? I find the exact opposite in many cases.

You can't afford it, so how can you afford the computer that you're using

What kind of an argument is this? We should waste $50 a year per person because it is insignificant and we couldn't possibly afford a computer iff we can't afford to waste that much? Do you work for the government or something?

You just have no desire to pay for software and/or hate Microsoft for XYZ reasons.

Or maybe OpenOffice is both cheaper and better for what we want to do. I want to trade documents with engineers using Linux boxes and with colleagues working in European governments. Those users send OO files. OpenOffice can read both those files and .doc files, while Word cannot.

Obviously all of those items are problems, but for the price and how good Office is for the Mac, I think it's quite a value.

Office for the Mac is bloated and slow. It uses more memory than Photoshop for Allah's sake. It has a worse record for opening old .doc files than OO does. I used Word for about 30 minutes yesterday to create a Word template for a co-worker and it crashed on me 3 times. MS has announced they are canceling VB support in the Mac version of Word and it will no longer be able to open files with macros. Are those enough reasons why we need a competitor in the running?

Besides, "free" is relative, this is alpha software that's 5 years AT BEST behind Microsoft Office.

In many ways this software is already ahead of MS Office. It all depends upon what you need to do.

I think that Google's Apps are much more promising as a Microsoft competitor than a buggy copy-cat of what you can already get for a relatively low cost.

When Google said their apps are not competing with MS's offerings, that was not just marketing fluff. They really do serve different needs. Not many companies will let their files be managed for them by Google. Not many users are ready for needing the internet for all word processing. The ideal use cases for these designs is very different.

Re:Why?

[Dynedain]

Why? What's the point of this? The Microsoft Office Student/Teacher edition can be purchased readily from Apple's online store for $149 for the full version of Office. If you can't afford $149 for your productivity either:

A) Your time isn't worth any money and you should reconsider what you're using it for
B) You can't afford it, so how can you afford the computer that you're using
C) You just have no desire to pay for software and/or hate Microsoft for XYZ reasons.

Or:
D) You aren't a student or teacher, and the few times per year that you need an office suite don't justify a $300 expense.

$300 is half the price of the Mac Mini to run it on. The $600 spent on the Mini goes a lot farther in terms of productivity than $300 spent on MS Office.

Re:Why?

[DannyO152]

I'm neither student nor teacher. I am a satisfied NeoOffice user and find it (and OO.o on Linux and Windows) more productive than Office.

Re:Why?

[unimacs]

Most people I know only have occasional use for a spreadsheet and MS Word is overkill for their word processing needs. The problem is that MS Office owns the market and I constantly get documents sent to me in Word and Excel format. So what I want is something that's reasonably good at reading and writing MS Office documents, but I neither need or want MS Office itself.

I'm not opposed to paying for software, but I do have a limited budget for software purchases and I'd rather spend my money on something I really want. If my job revolved around writing proposals and creating spreadsheets, I'd be more inclined to purchase MS Office, but frankly I think $300 is a lot for what it gives you.

I'm not student or a teacher so I don't qualify for the $150 price but even at that price, it's not worth it to me. I consider word processing and simple spreadsheets to be basic functionality that I shouldn't have to pay extra for when I buy a computer. It's sort of like buying a car and having to pay extra for a heater.

Re:Why?

[brian.reading]

Your time isn't worth any money and you should reconsider what you're using it for

How about students who are actually expected to pay for what they're doing full-time instead of the other way around? What I'm doing is certainly worthwhile, but it doesn't mean it's affordable by any means.

Re:Why?

[Mspangler]

D; I'm not a student, or a teacher so I don't qualify for the discount; I don't want to lie about it; and $350 is too much for the 4 hours a year I need a spreadsheet.

And there are better word processors than Word. It's bloated itself to the point where it barely runs at all, and argues with me about what I want to do. At work, (where they are enamored with all things M$) I've started using Wordpad more and more, because it doesn't flipping argue with me.

And don't even get me started on Outlook's habit of randomly changing fonts in mid e-mail.

Or on svchost.exe hogging 98% of CPU and 100 MB RAM for no obvious reason at random times through the day, but I honestly don't think that is Office's fault. That's just general M$ idiocy.

Back to Office, if Bill will offer Excel alone for $99, no strings or special conditions, I'll buy it. Otherwise, I'm taking my business elsewhere.

i'd love to test this software.

[lone bear]

However, having it only available on the torrent networks is not useful. There are some places of work, mine included, that do not allow any torrents.

Re:i'd love to test this software.

[tehcyder]

However, having it only available on the torrent networks is not useful. There are some places of work, mine included, that do not allow any torrents.

Well, unless your job is as a tester of other people's alpha software, why exactly do you think you should be allowed to download it at work?

Re:i'd love to test this software.

[Anonymous Coward]

torrent links are now fixed

Re:i'd love to test this software.

[Ash-Fox]

However, having it only available on the torrent networks is not useful. There are some places of work, mine included, that do not allow any torrents.

Feel free to offer a HTTP or FTP mirror to OpenOffice.org for this usage.

Good news...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for the world's 13,731 Mac users!

and...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Bean? While not a kitchen-sink suite, it seems like one helluva word processor.

I don't see why

[JustNiz]

I don't see why OpenOffice has this warning.
Microsoft Office has been crashing and losing data for years but some people still use it in a production environment.

run your own comparison test

[constantnormal]

Since both OO and NeoOffice are free, it really makes sense to download each of them and perform your own testing.

In particular, do they each:

1) use the standard OS X print and file navigation dialogs?

2) copy & paste using standard OS X facilities, playing nice with other apps?

3) use the standard OS X fonts?

4) provide Spotlight interfaces/plugins so that the documents are indexed by Spotlight?

5) provide access via the Services menu to things like the OS X system-wide Dictionary, or the Mail app?

6) support international languages in the standard OS X manner?

7) support Applescript -- at least via GUI scripting?

You can add other items to this list, but that's a useful starter set of comparison metrics.
Additionally, one should compare footprints (memory and disk) and overall responsiveness, in addition to launch times.

I think that OpenOffice has an incredibly long way to go before they can catch up to NeoOffice. NeoOffice still has room for improvement (as can be seen from the items in the above list that NeoOffice doesn't do -- I'll let you figure out which ones those are yourself), but it's an awesome program.

Re:run your own comparison test

[TheRaven64]

Since both OO and NeoOffice are free, it really makes sense to download each of them and perform your own testing. I've just downloaded the OO.o release and:

1) use the standard OS X print and file navigation dialogs? Yes for saving, no for printing (which doesn't work yet anyway).

2) copy & paste using standard OS X facilities, playing nice with other apps? Copy and paste doesn't appear to work.

3) use the standard OS X fonts? Doesn't appear so.

4) provide Spotlight interfaces/plugins so that the documents are indexed by Spotlight? Nope.

5) provide access via the Services menu to things like the OS X system-wide Dictionary, or the Mail app? Services depend on the pasteboard, so aren't going to work until that works.

6) support international languages in the standard OS X manner? It detected my locale correctly (I downloaded the US English version, and it selected the UK English version), but it may have picked that up from an old OO.o or NeoOffice install.

7) support Applescript -- at least via GUI scripting? Not yet.

And, my personal pet peeve, it still leaves an empty window open when you close the last document and exits (well, crashes) when you close that. It's not a Mac app yet, but a lot of the really hard work has been done. It's definitely impressive as a work-in-progress.

Why All the Fuss?

[beadfulthings]

NeoOffice does the same thing only better and more reliably.

Re:please help

[Miseph]

Do her a favor and just block myspace.com at the firewall.

Myspace sucks.

There's no such standard...

[mbessey]

Another common definition (we used to use this one in one group I worked in at Apple):
      Alpha: Ready for testing by folks inside the company, but outside the development team
      Beta: Ready for testing by a carefully-selected group of customers outside the company
      Gamma: Ready for release to all customers
      GM or Golden Master: The version actually released to customers (in most cases, this is the same as the Gamma version)

Re:There's no such standard...

[Doc Ruby]

When did you use those definitions at Apple?

When I worked at Apple (1993-4), we used Alpha: dev team testing; Beta: testing outside dev team, whether Apple or Apple customers; Golden Master: Finally released to users, testing considered complete. The "Gamma" term was sometimes used informally, to refer to release candidates culminating in the Golden Master that shipped.

It sounds like that system is the same as yours, though yours formalized using "Gamma", and made the "dev team" boundary into anyone at Apple vs anyone outside Apple.

I think the inside/outside Apple boundary is arbitrary in terms of the quality of the code, and more importantly the control of the project. It does relate to marketing, and to the priority on control of rumors and "buzz" since Jobs came back.

Now for the GIMP

[qaz20]

How about a graphics program that runs on OSX and doesn't require X11 or hundreds of dollars?

Cool, Capcha fortune tellers - mine said foolish

Right Direction, An Esspecially Rough Alpha, Why?

[BrendaEM]

If you look at the list of bugs, some are quite nasty.

        * You cannot print
        * PDF export does not properly work as thetext won't show on the page right
        * Starting OpenOffice.org from a shared folder does not work
        * Copy and paste does not fully work
        * OpenOffice.org will crash after quitting
        * Some text is not drawn in places like Impress
        * Impress will not recognise multiple monitors

I download a lot of "beta" and "Alpha" software. I have never seen piece of software released that the developers knew it constantly crashes.
If is so rough that I found two typos in the known bugs.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.ht ml

They spent years twiddling their thumbs why people asked them to port OpenOffice to OSX. They had a X11 version of OpenOffice, but X11 is not the standard for Macs, it's an option. They waited a while longer for the Openoffice API's were changed. NeoOffice showed them up a little, and now more people are buying Macs, and they were wondering what's going on with OpenOffice.org. They questioned the Sun's steering committee's influence. So, succumbing to pressure, they, and a lot of hardworking volunteers, created an alpha.

So, they proved their point. Technically, they are making progress. Software often has a lot of bugs when it's released, but usually not a known repeatable crash. It appears that they met some kind of self-imposed time limit.

Let me explain what I meant

[LKM]

> And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is for Geeks, not for "regular" users. Yeah so maybe just throw out some source code of X11 that barely compiles and you need to fix it yourself. No binary release - then it would be even geekier. :)

Not sure what you're trying to say here.

> The existing issues with X11 are intentional. Yeah. :) That is what I love Mac fanatics - if something is broken in OSX it must be intentional. LoL.

Labelling people "mac fanatics" because you don't understand their reasoning is pretty cheap. In your defense, I admit that I was unclear in my original post. Let me explain what I meant.

Apple depends on Mac OS X having applications which do not exist on other operating systems. It's a competitive advantage. Remember NeXT? They had a nice cross-platform development library which allowed NeXT apps to run on Windows. Initially, Apple planned to keep this in OS X. It was called "yellow box" ("blue box" was for old Mac apps).

Interestingly, the idea didn't survive. Eventually, Cocoa became Mac only. Why? Because Apple wants Mac-only applications.

Another example is Java. Making Java apps look good on a Mac is hard. Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only.

And this brings us to X11. X11 is awesome if you want to run all kinds of apps on the Mac, but these apps don't behave like Mac apps. Why? Because if they did, it would be trivial to write Mac apps using X11 and then port them to other operating systems. Apple would rather keep these apps on the Mac, thus they are discouraging the use of X11 for Mac apps.

Do you now understand the reasoning, or are you still LOLing at me?

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[kosmosik]

>>> And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is
>>> for Geeks, not for "regular" users.

>> Yeah so maybe just throw out some source code of X11
>> that barely compiles and you need to fix it yourself.
>> No binary release - then it would be even geekier. :)

> Not sure what you're trying to say here.

I mean wouldn't it be more "for geeks than regular use" to must compile your own X11? :) Following your argumentation that X11 in OSX is broken since it is for geeks so it should be hard to use decently (?).

>>> The existing issues with X11 are intentional.

>> Yeah. :) That is what I love Mac fanatics - if
>> something is broken in OSX it must be intentional. LoL.

> Labelling people "mac fanatics" because you don't understand their

I understand what you stated. I state that X11 in OSX is crap because it is *broken*. You sugest that it is OK that it is broken since it is for geeks which is mac fanatism of your side

(Cut some unrelated crap)

> X11 is awesome if you want to run all kinds of apps on
> the Mac, but these apps don't behave like Mac apps.

I don't want it to behave like Aqua - I wan't like basic functionality like keyboard working duh. Your inflated theories do not change anything here. X11 in OSX is old nearly unusable. This is why OOo needs to be ported to Aqua.

> (by breaking X11) thus they are discouraging the use
> of X11 for Mac apps.

How microsoftish of them. Maybe if they discourage the use they shouldn't bundle X11 with OSX in the first place?

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[LKM]

I mean wouldn't it be more "for geeks than regular use" to must compile your own X11? :) Following your argumentation that X11 in OSX is broken since it is for geeks so it should be hard to use decently (?).

I don't think you need to compile your own apps to qualify for geekdom, but point taken.

You sugest that it is OK that it is broken since it is for geeks which is mac fanatism of your side

No, I did not say it was OK that it was broken. I said that it was intentional.

Your inflated theories do not change anything here. X11 in OSX is old nearly unusable. This is why OOo needs to be ported to Aqua.

Thanks, you just gave me a perfect example validating my "inflated theories." What you're saying is: would X11 be more functional, Mac OS X would not get an Aqua port of OOo.

Thus, it makes sense for Apple to keep X11 broken.

How microsoftish of them. Maybe if they discourage the use they shouldn't bundle X11 with OSX in the first place?

It's not installed by default, as far as I remember.

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not installed by default, as far as I remember. Correct. It's hidden inside some application on the installation disk. Which as the OS is preinstalled most people won't get to see, and will just throw it in with all their other software disks.

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[Old Benjamin]

Great reasoning. Let me sum up. I'm not a Mac fanatic because Apple is intentionally doing what M$ does.

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[LKM]

Great reasoning. Let me sum up. I'm not a Mac fanatic because Apple is intentionally doing what M$ does.

Your summing up skills are severely lacking. In case you missed it, I did not defend Apple. I pointed out their reasoning. I do not know how that makes me a "Mac fanatic," but it seems to me you have some kind of grudge against people who buy Apple hardware. This is your problem, not mine, so please keep it yours and don't try to make it mine. Have a nice evening.

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[tsa]

I'm with you completely. I once said that it's such a pity that Apple made this wonderful OS X, and then topped it off with the good-looking but really not so handy interface aqua is. Why did they not make an improved X11-like window manager with all the goodies X11 has (networking! I love to run applictions on my other machine and have the windows appear on my MacBook Pro. Why can I not do that with native OS X apps?) and an aqua-like interface?

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[k2r]

> X11 [...] apps don't behave like Mac apps. Why? Because if they did, it would be trivial to write Mac apps using X11
> Do you now understand the reasoning

Your reasoning is flawed.

Could you please elaborate a way to make generic X11-Apps work like Cocoa-Apps?

This would be like making apple-pie from minced meat.

X11 happens on an absolutely different layer than Cocoa does and the part of Cocoa you are thinking of right now is just a tiny bit of a huge, elaborate framework.

Please understand what the GnuStep-Project is about and then come back

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[LKM]

I don't think you understood what I wrote.

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[k2r]

> I don't think you understood what I wrote.
So I read it again:-)

> Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only.

I don't think that you understand the technical implications of making an ObjC-Java-Bridge-Cocoa application behave the same as a ObjC-Cocoa application.
A product nobody used (name one big project, and don't say OOo, because they don't).

Even more unlikely is making a X11-Whatever-Windowmanager-WidgetFramework-Whateve r behave the same.

Essentially Apple would have to port half of their OS to a different platform.
(And yes, I did use OSX-Server while yellow box was still alive)

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[LKM]

Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only. I don't think that you understand the technical implications of making an ObjC-Java-Bridge-Cocoa application behave the same as a ObjC-Cocoa application.

Okay, maybe it is me who does not understand. I think I kind of fail to see how this is connected to my argument.

I said that Apple has an incentive to make easily portable apps feel un-Mac-like, and thus for Mac developers to use non-portable frameworks. They could make X11 adhere to the Mac Interface Guidelines (support keyboard commands, read settings the user made, change button styles and so on), but they don't. They could automatically install X11, but they don't.

I frankly do not know where your hypothetical Mac-like Objective-C-Java-Bridge appliation comes in. Are you saying that Apple is not making X11 more Mac-like because that is too hard? I find that hard to believe, there are way too many low-hanging fruits for this to be true.

Re:Let me explain what I meant

[k2r]

> Are you saying that Apple is not making X11 more Mac-like because that is too hard?

Exactly. It's like trying to make an apple-pie from minced meat. Both are food.
X11+WM+GTK is so very different from OSX/Cocoa that it just does not make sense.

I just downloaded and tried on my Mac Pro

[Pengo]

It started up faster than NeoOffice, but when I tried to type something.. it wouldn't display what I was typing until after I hit entered a space or hit enter.

The product crashed when I tried to Exit wanting to give me a crash report. They have a -LONG- way to go.

Also, the widgets all feel strangely out of place (Like a Mac OSX theme running on top of Gnome).

no need to

[nanosquid]

My wife had to switch to **brrrr** Microsoft Office on her powerbook because OO.org on the Mac just didn't work for her, being unstable and what have you.

NeoOffice works like a charm; I use it for all my presentations, spreadsheet, and word processing on Macintosh and Linux. It also reads and writes MS Office files without problems.

Seashore

[henrikba]

Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/) is based on GIMP, and has a native MacOSX interface. It's not Photoshop, of course, but it's still quite useable.

Yawn....

[butterwise]

Wake me up when there is a version available for my iPod.

I know it's an alpha version...

[Corpuscavernosa]

... but really? No copy/paste? They still have to work that one out?

What's the point again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently missing functionality includes printing, pdf export, copy/pasting,

Err, what's the point of an office package that won't let you print, make a pdf to print somewhere else, or copy and paste? That's not alpha, that's broken.

Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

This OOo alpha is a load of crap. I tried it out and I can't even print.

I read nothing warning me about this!

You know what else?

I can't cut and paste reliably.

Again, no warning! I understand that it's an alpha version, but someone should have at least ATTEMPTED to tell us about these problems.

Your right, it's not Alpha!

[nbritton]

Pre_Alpha = Feature incomplete and lots of bugs.
Alpha = Feature complete and lots of bugs.
Beta = Feature complete and less bugs.
RC = Speak up if you still have bugs.
Release = Since no one is speaking out we'll assume it's golden.
Release Patch = We missed some obscure stuff.

If you look at the download torrent it says "pre-alpha development snapshot".

Not hypocrisy, just stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not hypocrisy. The problem is that BSD people expect everybody else to behave like they do. In other words, they would like that people act as is the BSD license was the GPL, but without the need to coerce them.

Sorry guys, the world doesn't work that way. The GPL is a pragmatic license in that sense. It doesn't expect that you will behave. It ensures that you will.

Re:Not hypocrisy, just stupidity

[Goaway]

To borrow the analogy used by an earlier reply, would you then prefer that buses have a Politness Officer who pulls you out of your seat if you don't get up and offer your seat in a crowded bus for an elderly person? Is that a better situation than one where you are supposed to do so of your own free will, and are given the option to be an ass?

Re:Right Direction, An Esspecially Rough Alpha, Wh

[Qubit]

If is so rough that I found two typos in the known bugs.

I found a typo, too! :)

All joking aside, the terms 'alpha' and 'beta' don't mean what they used to -- I mean, GMail's logo still says 'BETA' on it, but it's not really in "beta mode" anymore...

I'm not really sure what 'alpha' means... but I must commend the OpenOffice people for pushing this release out the door.
The reason why this is so important is that the porting project finally has something released that builds using Aqua. It's not just a pipe dream...there's actually something that people can start up and look at (even if they can't use most of the features yet) that is a native version of OOo for OSX.

Even if it's a little rough at first, this build is a good start. The porting people need to make small goals, meet them, and move to the next goal. Now that the project has met this big, visible milestone, I think that (Mac) users will be much more willing to donate money to push this porting project along...

New Version Warnings

[LibertarianWackJob]

I liked the Evolution Suite's Beta warning (from Fedora 7 test 1)

"Do not use this software if you are prone to violent fits of anger."

Re:Huh wha?

[brian.reading]

I'd be better of using pico and terminal!

Yeah, except Pico is a Text Editor not a Word Processor.

A Good Start, Particularly the Text Rendering

[ickoonite]

This is nice. Very nice. There's a long way to go yet - some seriously rough edges - but I am already impressed: they have got it using Apple's font engine. Try switching your document font to Hoefler Text and you'll see. Automatic ligatures and everything.

Couldn't type properly in Japanese yet - the hovering IME window doesn't show up, but when "entered", the text shows up.

Plenty more to do then, but this bodes well. By using Apple's font engine for text rendering, they have already gone one better than Microsoft in Office 2004!

iqu :)

Re:please help

[PenguSven]

yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah cos if you would had let me finished i was gonna do that. SHUTUP!

bean

[chaos421]

what about bean? seems like a pretty good word substitute to me. granted openoffice has many more features. iWork is also pretty good, and $79 isn't too hard on the wallet.

This is Bad news

[poliopteragriseoapte]

I much prefer to run Openoffice under X11. In fact, I wish I could run firefox under X11 as well. Under X11, I can cut and paste using mouse buttons; otherwise, all I have is that apple-C -V stuff (how slow, how inconvenient). Under X11, I can move focus to a window simply by sliding the mouse on it; otherwise, I have to click on it (and as a consequence, only top-level windows can be in focus; it is quite convenient often to be able to type into an only partially-exposed window!). So the more applications run under X11, the happer I am.

Re:This is Bad news

[Goaway]

I think you bought the wrong computer by mistake.

copy/paste is missing in a word processor?

[someone1234]

With risking to be called a troll, I wouldn't call it alpha.

The 1980's Called, Wants It's Software Back

[gig]

This is a complete fucking waste of time.

A word processor?

You are killing me. A fucking word processor. It is like inviting people to use a back-breaking chair.

Now that we have more than one output medium, it is important to separate content from style. We also have a "universal" text format which is UTF-8 but we do not have a universal style format. If you munge in your styles with your text you are just setting up a situation where a publishing professional is going to have to rip that text back out of there and if you stored it with a funky old encoding good luck on your smart quotes and em dashes.

What would be the point of enabling a computer user in 2007 type type text and apply styles and you don't save their work as HTML+CSS? What is the point? It makes no sense to me.

What is required when you write is to store the actual typing. If you save UTF-8 you can type any character from any language and then later another human can use that UTF-8 text file to instantly "re-type" your work into any publishing system, smart quotes and all. No conversion necessary, no errors introduced. Doesn't matter if they are working in InDesign or Dreamweaver or other, there is simply no defensible argument for not having a single UTF-8 master copy of any kind of writing. You can drop it on a browser to read even 25 years from now, it will be compatible long after you are dead. In the entire history of computing there has not been a word processing format that lasted even 10 years. If you open a Word document from Word 97, that is only 10 years ago, it has to be "converted" (destroyed) when you open it. Good luck with that system here in the 21st century.

If Microsoft tries to sell ice in the Arctic, will open source follow with open source ice for the Arctic?

Movable Type is about 10,000 times more exciting than OpenOffice. I mean, c'mon.

TextWrangler for Mac OS X is free and it has UTF-8, RegEx find/replace that works across any number of files or a whole disk, real-time speller, S/FTP, lots of writing tools, a great find differences, beautiful text rendering, and completely scriptable with AppleScript (macros). Those are the tools that people need to do good writing and create documents that can be used in modern ways, not mail merge and bad fonts.

Re:The 1980's Called, Wants It's Software Back

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be the point of enabling a computer user in 2007 type type text and apply styles and you don't save their work as HTML+CSS? What is the point? It makes no sense to me.

Because there's no one way to render HTML, so you'll have a mess of incompatibilities? Because CSS doesn't have enough features for a word processor?

you save UTF-8 you can type any character from any language and then later another human can use that UTF-8 text file to instantly "re-type" your work into any publishing system, smart quotes and all. No conversion necessary, no errors introduced.

If you ever tried Unicode's bidi-algorithem, you'll see your description is a little bit rose-colored.

In the entire history of computing there has not been a word processing format that lasted even 10 years. If you open a Word document from Word 97, that is only 10 years ago, it has to be "converted" (destroyed) when you open it. Good luck with that system here in the 21st century.

The problem is the closed format. With ODF we won't have this problem.

Microsoft

[zeban274]

I bet Microsoft is gonna be pretty pissed i mean after all open office is free and it beats the holy hell out of office price wise.

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[DJ_Maiko]

"Alpha" testing is testing by people who participated in the design and/or implementation. Any testing by people not in those teams is, by definition, "Beta" testing. Alpha/Beta/Release is not a measure of quality or maturity. It just tells who is testing, and their relationship to the software. You're COMPLETELY off-base on this. I've worked in software QA for ~10yrs & different companies/products have varying meanings (but some things are pretty standard). Early-alpha usually means it's being tested in-house. The Alpha stage is also, mostly, tested in-house but can be extended to vested/interested parties on a very select basis. Beta testing stages is when you see the most outside testing. Lastly, alpha/beta/release stages ARE a measure of quality/maturity as certain pre-determined, in-house milestones have to be reached before the software can be labeled as such, or progress in stage. The only exception, of course, is anything touched by Microsoft- in which case even 5 years after "release," users who paid for their "released" software are STILL beta-testing.

If you're going to come off as if you know something about a topic, you should at least do your homework before spewing nonsense. By your definition, it would seem that once something goes beta, the developers stop testing which even the noobiest of noobs knows isn't the case.

non-US keyboards?

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

clickity-clickity

Don't get scared by the non-US symbols on that page, you can find the product pages for keyboards without too much effort.

So, what was it you were trying to say?

joudanzuki

Re:non-US keyboards?

[itsdapead]

Folks! Can we not distinguish between what I wrote:

Yeah, but Apple don't really [i]do[/i] non-US keyboards, do they?

...which was an obvious hyperbole referring to the fact that Apple UK keyboards and (as far as I can tell*) several other latin-alphabet countries are basically the US layout with the bare minimum changes for currency symbols etc. and differ considerably from the de-facto standard national layouts used by the PC.

and the statement that some people appear to be reading:

I hereby state definitively that Apple Inc. do not produce any form of regionalised keyboards even for countries that use accented characters, non-QUERTY layouts or, heaven forbid, non-latin character sets.

...which is obviously complete horse droppings.

In future, I promise to make any slashdot postings completely literal and will avoid hyperbole on pain of deat... oh, blast!

(* Mainly from threads on the Parallels support forums from UK and other EU Mac users asking why they can't type a "@" in windows...)

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[Doc Ruby]

You've worked in SW QA for ~10 years... since 1997. That's 3 years after Netscape's "public beta" struck a crippling blow to SW QA, especially in the release cycle, but also in opening SW development to any halfass who put "HTML programmer" on their resume. Since then, SW quality has been anything but "assured", except that it's dependably lower quality than when development had some discipline.

Different SW houses do indeed do it differently. From each other, and from when quality was more reliable, and - more to the point - predictable. The scenario you described abuses the meaning of Alpha/Beta/Release, the same way marketers have abused version numbering into largely arbitrary numbers (sometimes not even sequential, as Solaris) to create an appearance of improvement that's not directly correlated to the actual production process.

What do I know about the subject? I released my first software in 1977. I released my first software in the "Internet" (DARPANet) in 1981. I've produced SW for supercomputers, mainframes, PCs, DSPs, embedded controllers, mobile phones/PDAs, in multiple countries, in Silicon Valley, in NYC, in a few dozen languages, from 8 to 128 bits. I've made a living as exclusive a Beta tester, and Alpha/Beta/Release tested hundreds of SW packages, including private Betas of Photoshop, RealAudio/Video, and many others spawned in the current post-Netscape version naming chaos. I've worked for Apple Computer, several governments (foreign and domestic), dozens of Fortune 500 corps. I've started up SW companies and wound them down. I've taught hundreds of programmers, from adolescents to college/grad to retraining COBOL programmers. I've made $millions for myself, hundreds of $millions for my direct customers. I've invented several applications and businesses. I've managed up to dozens of developers/etc simultaneously.

In other words, I know more about SW development and its processes than you probably ever will. In fact, I know more about obsolete SW development than you know about the current "state of the art". And I know people like you, who fill the industry with incompetence, largely out of conceit to reinvent the wheel without spokes. So don't give me any crap about your resume. If you want to debate testing names and discipline, try to say something that at least sounds professional. Try to say something indicating you're worth debating, which doesn't include either insults which you're totally unqualified to deliver, or nonsense like "only exception is Microsoft".

For example, just because Beta SW is defined by testing by people outside the dev team, doesn't mean developers don't test it (people in the SW business should know that the converse is not necessarily true, a logical fallacy). But again, if you want to debate, give me some kind of reason. Instead of proving just why the SW QA business is so shabby, because it's got loudmouth newcomers who can't learn from the lessons we learned from in the past.

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[tomknight]

I guess Apple have decided to move on. Get with the times, grey one!

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[tomknight]

Okay, not Apple but OpenOffice. Yes, I'm a bloody fool. Still, they do say:

"This is an alpha test version so that developers and users can find out what works and not, and make comments on how to improve it.

There are a number of things that do not work in this version including, but not limited to:
* You cannot print
* PDF export does not properly work as the text won't show on the page right
* Starting OpenOffice.org from a shared folder does not work
* Copy and paste does not fully work
* OpenOffice.org will crash after quitting
* Some text is not drawn in places like Impress
* Impress will not recognise multiple monitors"

Looks like they consider this an Alpha release they're extending to the public. Seems a bit lazy in some ways, but I guess they're proud of how far they've come...

Re: disclaimer

[kimvette]

The site is very blunt: 'WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT.

If only Microsoft software were to come with this warning, then there would be truth in advertising. ;)

lameness filter blocks quoting the story so let's type a bit to try to get rid of the warning

Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

I think it was something brought over from NeXT

[mbessey]

For the OS group, it was necessary to make the distinction between "this is something that's okay for folks inside the company to use" and "this is okay for customers to see". Typically we'd release something internally when the APIs had mostly firmed up, and didn't release Beta versions to customers until the software was more visually polished.

That was probably a somewhat unique situation. Everybody at the company had a dependency of some sort on the next version of the OS, so it was important to have a milestone for "this software is complete enough for someone to use for development and testing of related products".

Re:I think it was something brought over from NeXT

[Doc Ruby]

That's possible. I think the nature of each stakeholder helps define the boundaries among them.

FWIW, the two Apple versions of Alpha/Beta/Release distinction are pretty close. This "public OO.o/OSX Alpha" release is very different from them. And it's reckless, tuned to promote (and disclaim) "early code", abandoning project control info.

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[Doc Ruby]

That's my point exactly. Apple, which is experienced at managing releases for maximum benefit to developers and consumers, does it the way that I said. The novices, who are releasing unusable SW, spending time on releasing instead of making it usable, are doing it wrong. Those bugs show they are reinventing all kinds of wheels, even on the newish OSX platform where there are existing solutions for almost all of those problems.

Their pride is prompting a careless move that will have costs to them and their users. The grey is a sign of wisdom, which is valuable, and beats youthful naivete.

Get with the program, larvae!

Re:please help

[Miseph]

What?

All I heard was *whoosh*

Re:please help

[PenguSven]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicky_Pollard

standards

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

Well, sure, I mean the Japanese keyboards (and -- mostly -- the software interfaced to them via the OS) have strange issues about the (half-width) backslash and (half-width) yen symbol. For several years you had to have some serious ambition to try to use Project Builder to write C when you had your log-in account set for Japanese in Mac OS X. I mean, when you have trouble getting a newline into a debug printf(), it can be hard slogging.

Why is it less of a problem with MS-OSses? Well, let's just say they are the half-wits most responsible for the half-width business and they were quietly (via application behavior) pushing their customers away from that for a long time.

(Me: But I really want to do this job and get paid for it.
MSWxxx: No. You don't want to go there. I promise you.
Me: [reboot, select FreeBSD])

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[DJ_Maiko]

I agree that alpha/beta/release has nothing to do w/the SW's state of quality or maturity. Your resume, while quite impressive, still doesn't explain that alpha/beta/release has NO correlation whatsoever w/who's testing & their relationship to the SW. I'll take the gaming industry, for example, where you can have outside testers (fan web portals, friends & family, etc.) be involved in the process in alpha AND beta. My point is that your premise that "alpha testing is testing by people who participated in the design and/or implementation" is completely off-base- which it is as it's not completely confined to those individuals.

I also agree that SW QA has been going downhill for a long time. But since you've had such an illustrious career in the field, you of all people should know a few of the reasons for this. QA is an afterthought for many organizations trying to get away with the bare minimum that their bottom line will allow. QA, often times, is the redheaded stepchild of the SDLC. There's ALWAYS a slip in the schedule (for a myriad of reasons) & it's up to QA to make up the time & get the project back on track, time line-wise. Due to a lack of planning, this isn't always successful & QA has to fall on the sword. Everyone's to blame, honestly (since there's SO many SW titles that are "released" when they shouldn't be), but from my mere (in your eyes) experience, blame lies mostly on Project Managers & Producers who make the unrealistic schedules to begin with (many times, caving in to executives who "corner" them into SDLC dates just to appease them). But like I said, since you've got 20 yrs. more experience than I, you should know this as well. I know I wasn't around when you were programming in punch cards but a fellow dev like yourself should understand the bigger picture or is this bitterness something I have to look forward to when I'm an old fogey as well? Oh & the Microsoft reference was a joke, or were you too bitter at anyone opposing your omniscient viewpoint to notice? /smile

Re:Not Alpha--- you're wrong!

[Doc Ruby]

When I say "alpha means tested by only the dev team", I mean the proper discipline. Of course I don't mean the widely abusive practice.

I cited my experience in reply to an attack on my qualifications to say which discipline is used, what works. It's not just an impressive resume. It's a list of how the discipline has been tested in so many ways, with both successes and failures pointing to the right way.

There is a significant difference between the expectations of the dev team (Alpha), a sample of the users (Beta) and the general "public" (Release). Those expectations define the results almost as much as the content of the test. No other distinction has as much influence on the results. That's why the testing cycles are defined by them, and why they work. When they're used - when they're not, it works poorly, which is generally the case.

Producing software is a collaboration between groups of people, including the dev team, the testers, and the users - not necessarily mutually exclusive groups. But by keeping the testing defined by those lines, as much exclusivity as possible is obtained. That makes the process less self-selecting, more deductive. Which is the more easily controllable way to produce and process info. Which is why it works, and why mixing those groups fails. Which failure is reflected in arbitrary, rather than steadily progressing, degrees of quality labeled "Alpha/Beta" and even "Release", when the correct discipline is ignored.