On 7/2/06, Bernhard Dippold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


> Again, you have to remember that I created the site 6 months ago.
>  It was a far simpler time then, a time of peace, and a time of
> innocence. A time when two open source office suites based on the
>  same source code could coexist, side-by-side, and actually work
>  together in harmony.  But that was before the dark times.

The greater part of the community didn't know about the problems
between NeoOffice and the OOo Mac port - Eric described us in his mail
http://marketing.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=23837
  more about it (with a link to the NeoOffice forum).

The discussion in the NeoOffice forum took place in November 2005,
so the dark times started before in the background.



It looks to me that the dark times officially started in April of this year.

From http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html:

April 2006

There has been some confusion about the relationship between
OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice and we would like to clear things up.

Our focus is and must be porting OpenOffice.org to the Mac. In the last
year, we have been very successful in getting 2.0 to the Mac OS (X11) and
our team now includes many. We are further taking the port to Mac Intel, and
beta builds are running of this. These are real and important
accomplishments, and they could not have been done without the support of
the community. Our ultimate goal is to fully port OpenOffice.org to Mac OS
X on Aqua. For that, we need all the help the Mac community can provide.

Direct links to NeoOffice were removed because our focus is on
OpenOffice.org, not NeoOffice, which is a derivation based substantially
(more than 98 percent) on OpenOffice.org code. If the OpenOffice.orgcoding 
effort is to be successful, we need for users to work directly with
us.

We have no argument with NeOffice and wish them the best in their efforts.
Their approach differs from ours but satisfies many users. We invite them to
work with us in building OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 and beyond and in fully
porting OpenOffice.org to the Mac. We are also open to the idea of
collaborating: exchanging ideas and code (when possible) in a useful,
friendly, and productive way.

We hope this clears up some of the misunderstandings. Again, we invite
friendly collaboration and cooperation and would like for the Mac community
to help us port OpenOffice.org to Aqua.

If you want to join the fun, go to Mac Porting site Our list is
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Despite the pleasant sounding words on this page, eric's emails and offense
at me even mentioning NeoOffice, and the continued insistence that I give
"equal time" if not complete worship to, the Mac OS X11 team, prove that
"we" in fact *DO* have argument with NeoOffice, and DON'T wish them the best
in their efforts.

And here is the reason why I will not promote, support, condone, advertise,
or push in any way any end user to even think about trying the X11 port -

(Again, from the same page, http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html )

Mai 2006

The growing number of questions on mac porting mailinglist shows us that
it's time to help the growing number of OpenOffice.org Newbies getting
OpenOffice.org installed and not frustrated. 
Here<http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html#howto>are the links to our "
OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X How-To" on top of this site. Our thank goes to
Eric Bachard for providing the French How-to, to Loic Geslin for the english
translation, Uwe Altmann for the german translation and everybody else
involved.

If you want to help us please translate the How-to to your native
language. Contact us on this on mac at porting dot openoffice dot org.

The "growing number of questions" is a direct result of removing the
NeoOffice links.  People had no problems installing NeoOffice when it was
there.  But since they removed the links, you get to see how damn hard it is
to install X11 for a Mac End User.  Even if someone had tried to download
and install the X11 port, upon failing to get it to do anything other than
jump up and down in the dock for a few minutes - they would return to the
Mac OS X page, and download NeoOffice, which, of course, worked just fine.

Also, I would have pointed out that the three letter month is misspelled -
but I know that it wouldn't get changed until next Mai... I mean, May.
Which is why I built my site in the first place.

--
- Chad Smith
http://www.gimpshop.net/
http://www.whatisopenoffice.org/
http://www.chadwsmith.com/

Reply via email to