On 4 Jan 2012, at 08:03, eric b wrote: > > To justify this point of view, I got one famous example in mind : one > NeoOffice link was added (Simon Phipps around already ...) on the main > OpenOffice.org porting project web page. It was a disaster for OpenOffice.org > because people were confused, and thought NeoOffice was the "official" Mac OS > X port. This way, NeoOffice derivated a long time the porting project forces, > including donations who were derivated too.
Careful how you rewrite history, Eric. At the time for reasons many of us know well, OpenOffice.org had no Mac OS X release that was usable by or attractive to an end-user. NeoOffice provided one, and it was appropriate to point to them. The situation did move on from there later, but the choice taken at the time (to ensure end-users were directed to a place they could get up-to-date, working code from a bona fides downstream project) was the right one and grew the overall OpenOffice.org user community significantly. It also meant it was easy to prove there was indeed demand for a good Mac port. Without that earlier step I doubt Sun would have applied resources later to create a working Mac port. S.
