Sun joins OpenOffice “porting to Mac” project
I’m delighted to hear that Sun announced today joining the Mac OSX port of OpenOffice.org.
Sun, who founded the OpenOffice project by open-sourcing the StarOffice program code shortly after they acquired its former vendor StarDivision, are going this way due to the increasing use of Macs. They write:
Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port.
I am very glad to see this happen as it makes a native “aqua” port of OpenOffice much more likely to happen in this century than it was ever before.
And since most people at Mozilla are using Macs these days, this seems to be something to look forward to for a whole bunch of people.
(via TUAW)
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I’ve been rather happy with NeoOffice. I’ll be curious to see what comes of things now.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Yeah, I agree: The recent versions of NeoOffice have been very well usable.
Yet a native port, provided it doesn’t come with too many bugs, should almost play in a different league.
The NeoOffice developers tend to disagree (not surprisingly): They wrote an open letter to Sun, stating… “send beer.” (link)
May 3rd, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I kinda hope Sun keeps the X11 version as well as the carbonized version. Family members using my Mac keep complaining that it’s not a PC. X11 OpenOffice.org seems close enough to Microsoft Office on Windows to keep them happy.