Mathias Bauer wrote:
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)
One has to wonder why Apple themselves havn't done this, or financially
sponsored OOo to do it in a more timely manner. I get the impression
that there is no great love for M$ over at Apple, and having a great
free office package couldn't help but sell more Macs.
