Chad Smith wrote: > Why can 2 guys in their spare time do 4 years ago what > the entire of OpenOffice.org and Sun Microsystems hasn't been able to do in > as many years with full time employees?
First: I totally agree with you in this point: if you want to have an OOo that comes as close as possible to a native look and feel on the Mac *now*, go for NeoOffice! But IMHO you should wish the best to the brave (still volunteer!) developers that are heading for the "real thing". Why the "real thing"? NeoOffice is *not* a native Mac application, it mostly looks like one and also mostly feels like one, but it isn't. Obviously some people (like Guy) would like to get a real native version, so it is good that people try to achieve that. And Guy also mentioned another reason why people would prefer a real port inside OOo: NeoOffice is a fork and the history of forks has proven that they rarely succeed in the long run, let alone the risk that the developers of the fork quit working on it and leave their project back as an orphan. Forks always have to catch up with the main trunk development and in case there are some major changes ongoing the whole fork is put at risk if the changes don't fit well to the additional code of the fork. Please let me add a comment to your question I have quoted above. Sun has never worked on a native Mac port. So your question just doesn't hit the point. It's not a question of "not being able to do" but a question of "not wanting to do". Of course other developers would have been able to do the same thing as the NeoOffice developers did (make a fake native port by using the platform mimicry capabilities of Java that BTW are really great). But why should they do that? Why create another NeoOffice? The real question is: why can't other developers provide a real native version in the same time where the 2(?) developers implemented NeoOffice? The answer is simple: because this is much more work to do and much more complicated work that needs much more Mac expertise. Why did the developers that created NeoOffice not do the real native port themselves? Guess why. So you shouldn't talk bad about the ongoing work for the "real" native Mac port. It is correct that there has not been a lot of progress in that area for a long time but my impression is that this has changed in the last months. If more people advertized this effort and the ongoing work of the developers the bigger the chance would be that more developers jumped up and helped. In the meantime they can happily use NeoOffice and hope that this fork stays alive and kicking until the port will be done. Ciao, Mathias (who tried out NeoOffice on the last OOoCon and really liked it) -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
