Outer Web Thought Log
September 07, 2003
OpenOffice on Mac OSX: pain.
I know there's a fair amount of warning that the current Mac OSX version of OpenOffice is for 'Unix-savvy' users, but I'm afraid Unix-savvy means something different to me than to the OpenOffice team. Unix-savvy may mean 'with arcane settings you need to carefully adjust in some startup script', but in OO, it just means butt-ugly. OK, it's a really an X application rather than a normal OSX Carbon/Cocoa .app, so I should learn to live with messy fonts, strange keybindings, and starting up X when I just want to open a Word doc, but knowing that this will be it until Q1 2006 feels kinda left-alone. Yep, they currently plan to stop working on the Mac support in OO until some new foundation thingy is done, making a native Mac port easier (which, I assume, is the same kind of cross-platform-porting insulation framework sitting underneath Mozilla).

Some latenight-FUD-thinking of my own: OO is still very much tied into Sun. Being pissed off by the defeat of NetBeans against Eclipse (IBM), NetBeans being Sun's alternative for the much-touted MS development IDE (Visual something), they really want to make sure they effectively own the Open-Contender-against-MS-Office space. Due to Sun's persistent backward thinking with regards to their core business and competitors, with the success of Mac OSX and all these geeks buying TiBooks, they are worried about the future of the Sparc/Solaris combo, so they want to go after its contenders. XServe/MacOSX might be a contender for Sparc/Solaris in some arcane regions of the world (like graphic shops), so they decide not to support the MacOSX peeps anymore by giving them a nice port of OO. Hm... dubious reasoning for sure, which won't help much to alleviate my current I-need-to-work-with-office-documents pain. Should I purchase that $500 Office X for Mac license from MS? Or just live with the peculiarities of OO running under X11 for Mac? Who knows. I don't.

Posted by stevenn at September 7, 2003 11:39 PM ()
Comments

Gee - why doesn't Apple just step in and help to sponsor a better MacOSX interface to Open Office - it is open source afterall. This would also help turn around Apple's reputation of N.I.H. Why should Sun support a competitor's hardware when that vendor itself fails to contribute. Microsoft isn't going to be support Office for Mac too much longer.

Posted by: marty at September 9, 2003 06:21 AM

Don't forget, Microsoft pumped a lot of money into Apple some years ago. I guess it is so they could sell $500 copies of Office for MacOSX. However, this probably means that Apple is inclined not to completely shortchange Microsoft by pushing towards OpenOffice - even if they (and most of Apples employees), would want to.

Just a possibility...

Posted by: stefan at October 21, 2003 04:38 AM