Sun shines OpenOffice.org for Mac

Stephen Withers
Friday, 04 May 2007 09:26

Business IT - Technology

Sun has announced it is joining the effort to provide Mac users with a native 'Aqua' version of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) open-source office suite.

The current version of OOo for Mac relies on the X11 windowing system, making it relatively inconvenient for the average user and giving an unfamiliar look and feel. A native version using the normal Aqua UI would greatly increase the suite's acceptability.

Prior to Sun's announcement, the OOo Mac porting team planned to release an alpha of OOo Aqua this month, with a beta by the end of 2007.

Sun's Philipp Lohmann and Herbert Dürr will join volunteer participants working on OOo Aqua.

A separate project - NeoOffice - has already integrated various Mac OS X features into OOo. NeoOffice founders Patrick Luby and Ed Peterlin had worked within the OOo, but maintain a separate project to avoid the overheads required by a venture on the scale of OOo. "By running a separate project, we have eliminated most of this coordination time and have used that time savings on things that are important to NeoOffice users such as frequent bug fixes and responsive support" they say in the NeoOffice FAQ.

NeoOffice uses Java for the Mac interface, resulting in a relatively large memory footprint and therefore suboptimal performance on RAM-constrained systems.

Peterlin's response to Sun's announcement was a one line open message to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz: "Send beer" - presumably an allusion to the Free Software Foundation's observation that free software is closer to free speech than free beer, as well as a request for recognition of the work already done under the NeoOffice banner.