Chad Smith wrote: > <Side rant> > And why do people type Mac in all caps? It's not an acronym. It's short > for Macintosh - which is a type of apple. Linux is typed Linux, GNU, which > is an acronym, is typed GNU or Gnu. But Mac should not be in all caps. > It's shouting, and IMHO worse than typing M$ instead of MS or Microsoft, > which also bugs me. > </side rant>
OK. Bad habit. I promise to improve. :-) > Very little of the actual coding is done by volunteers, which means that if > all > the work for the Mac port is done by volunteers it will take a very very > long time. In fact, it already has. I was hearing the same "We're much > closer to Mac Native status" years ago. Actually, at first it was "Being > Mac Native is useless. The X11 port is far superior anyway. There is no > need or benefit to going Aqua." I can pull up the records, if you don't > believe me. Oh, I know this. And I disagree with these statements. The X11 port was (and still is) a nice stopgap solution. And it still is that for people that don't want to use the NeoOffice fork. But it is not superior to NeoOffice, it just serves another audience. >> IMHO the MAC and the MAC users would profit from a MAC version of OOo >> much more than OOo as a whole would. So it's not the OOo project that is >> primarily challenged to do something (and this includes Sun, Novell, >> RedHat and other companies working on the project), it's Apple. >> Obviously Apple doesn't have the balls to do it as you also stated: > > > Apple, as a company, has no need whatsoever for OpenOffice.org. Apple has > Microsoft Office. Apple has iWork. Apple has AppleWorks. Apple has > TextEdit. Apple has NeoOffice. Apple does not need OpenOffice.org. It depends. If Apple *users* wanted OpenOffice.org (that's what is discussed here) it should be in Apple's interest to serve their customers. So I can read your statement only in two ways: There is no demand for OpenOffice.org on the Mac (sic!) from its customers (but then why are we talking about it?) or Apple deliberately ignores such demand. > Apple makes most of its money selling music and mp3 players. Software is > pretty low on the income list for Apple. It goes the iPod, iTunes, Computer > Hardware, iPod Accessories, Computer Accessories, Operating Systems, > Software. They make more money selling earphones than they do selling first > party software. And, believe it or not, they make money selling MS Office > for Mac. They sell it online and in their stores. They get the retail mark > up profit. > > There is no motivation for Apple to make OpenOffice.org Mac native. I'm not talking about Apple making money with OpenOffice.org, I'm talking about Apple being interested in making the Mac more attractive or reacting on a demand. But if OpenOffice.org is not necessary for the Mac, again: then why are we talking about the Mac version at all? And why should Sun or anybody else work on the Mac version of OOo? IMHO OOo adds more to the Mac platform (not for Apple per se directly) than vice versa. But YMMV. > Macs have much more of a market share for desktops and laptops than Linux > ever will. Especially laptops. If OpenOffice.org wants ODF to become a > widely used and accepted standard, there is a motivation for it to run on > Mac, and to run to the level that Mac users will actually want to use it. If you are talking about market share and mass adoption on the desktop it's only Windows that counts. Sad but true. > Apple has the best experts for the work to do and IMHO a hand full of >> developers would suffice. I wouldn't be surprised if the OOo project >> gladly supported any initiative from Apple's side. > > You are right - Apple does have the best experts for the job. But they are > too busy working on Leopard, iWork, iLife, the iPhone, AppleTV, iTunes, the > iPod.... to bother with something that, financially speaking, they have no > need of. The same is true for the OOo developers: they are busy doing things that seem to be more important to them than a native Mac port. So why do you take different measures for Apple and other companies or projects? > Nobody works on software "out of the goodness of their heart". They did >> it to scratch their own itch. And to make it clear: there's nothing bad >> about that. At the end that's what Open Source software is all about. > > Agreed. Apple just doesn't have an itch to scratch in this game. So has Sun, Novell, Red Hat ... Ciao, Mathias -- 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]
