Sun joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac
by Volker Weber
Philipp Lohmann writes:
I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.
It was about time.
Comments
That's cracking news. After recently getting a Macbook, and after using OO on Linux for what seems like ages (since StarOffice 5), I've been very disappointed in OO on X11 for OSX. So disappointed that I pestered my boss for an iWork '06 license.
Has anybody tried NeoOffice? It's a Cocoa port of OO, and should integrate much better with OS X than the current OO.
Assuming NeoOffice works well and is stable, it seems stupid that Sun is going to repeat work that is already successfully done instead of contributing to NeoOffice.
A bit late isn't it? It would be more sensible, now, to support Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin, who've been doing a sterling job on NeoOffice for the last several years.
NeoOffice is intentionally licensed differently so none of the work can go back to OpenOffice.org, and there is a lake of bad blood between the (non-Sun) OO.o Mac porting project and the Neo guys. It would be great for the Neo work to be contributed back to OO.o but since that ain't gonna happen this is the next best thing, since it would be crazy for the Sun developers to have to work on two distinct codebases.
Apart from the licensing problem, I see another issue: NeoOffice relies on the Java/Cocoa Bridge, which has been deprecated and will stop being shipped with OS X some time. That's obviously not an inviting situation.
Actually, Timo, I believe that's not the case. The latest NeoOffice uses Aqua, pure and simple. The issues that prevent these two groups of brilliant programmers co-operating appear to be purely social.
Open letter from the NeoOffice guys:
“Send beer”
LOL. I like it.
