Sun Joins OpenOffice to Mac OS X Porting Efforts

Good news! I'm sure this will make many happy.

now what about that ZFS stuff?

Why bother? What's wrong with NeoOffice?

No, they're doing it to spite Microsoft.

Sun HATES Microsoft.

-Clive

Why bother? What's wrong with NeoOffice?

I think, even ultimately NeoOffice's goal is to someday branch back into OpenOffice.org -- the process that's used right now is inefficient and means that Mac users don't have an Aqua version of the suite at the latest revisions at many times.

Compare this to asking why Firefox 3 needs to be Aqua when we have Camino... I think it's essentially the same argument, although Java adds a layer in the case of Neo.

Why bother? What's wrong with NeoOffice?

exactly... i don't get it. is openoffice any better? or is it just so popular on the PC front that a lot of people want it on Mac too?

The other thing pointed out in the talkback to the blog is this:

Right now, Neo is essentially a translation or port. Code comes one way -- the Neo people primarily implement OOo in Aqua with Java. They sometimes also add new innovations. But they're generally working on porting OOo rather than advancing it. What that means is that Mac concerns are not taken as seriously at the planning phases of new versions of OOo. If OS X / Aqua were a primary build of OOo, then Mac people would be involved from the ground up each time new features are being planned, etc, right? That's a good thing... a really good thing.

If Sun are helping, does this mean there will be a supported Mac version of StarOffice at some point in the near future?

No, they're doing it to spite Microsoft.

Sun HATES Microsoft.

-Clive

They ain't the only ones, it would seem...!

I'd like to see them do a total port to obj-c and drop all the java. Overall the whole product needs a feature freeze and a year or two of polishing. OOo is potentially the most bloated and unstable application I've got on my Linux system, so I suppose they've succeeded in cloning MS Office in that sense (at least the Windows version).

good news.

yes there is NeoOffice, but it runs in Java, which i'll admit isnt the best under OS X and tends to make things a bit of a resource hog imo.