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

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

[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!

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...

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.