Without the hack (which should rather be called a "porting effort"), and the few developers behind it, NeoOffice would just be stuck in the middle of OOo dvp.
It was my understanding that the "few developers" of OOo on Mac did both X11 and NeoOffice - NeoOffice being branched outside of OOo for some political reasons. The ugly hack isn't well supported by Sun anyway, as evidenced by the hack that Star Office is not available for Mac at all. I think NeoOffice/J is much better, in every sense of the word, than OOo-X11.
It is not true, at least not anymore. If you check the porting list you'll see a lot of technical discussions about the OSX port and afaik the people working there are not at all involved in NeoOffice.
You can get all the information you want from the NeoOffice site, where Patrick Luby explains who he is and what he does.
The main issue being, if I understand well, that NeoOffice's code is covered by the GPL license and that it is thus not possible (for licensing reasons) to include it into the OOo code.
Luby has donated some code to help the X11/OSX port (which in my opinion should rather be labeled a "darwin" port) but most of the development happens within the X11/OSX OOo port effort.
I think that most of the porting effort is done by the NeoOffice/J guys. And for that, I am extremely grateful.
I am not aware of all the technical side, but my understanding is that NeoOffice/J takes the X11/OSX port, removes the X11 dependancies and replaces them with Java dependancies.
So the whole thing looks a little more like an OSX "normal" app while in fact is really is the OOo code base with a Java look.
Of course there are other issues involved.
I think that the X11/OSX port is also aiming at some kind of better integration with OSX but right now they are very busy with the 2.0 beta porting. Which will in the end benefit the whole OSX community: those who don't mind the X11 dependancy and those who can't do without the Java/OSX integration that NeoOffice proposes.
As far as I am concerned, the main issue I have with the X11 dependancy is that it does not allow me to access OSX's character input services. I need to type in French, English and Japanese all the time and I can't do that easily in X11 while NeoOffice gives me just what I need.
The rest is really a matter of taste since promoting the OpenOffice.org/OASIS OpenDocument file format is really the only thing that matters in the end.
Regards,
Jean-Christophe Helary
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