The article reports that the lead developer for Mac with OOo is flagging an aqua OOo release along with v3.0, timed for one year hence.
There is also the report that Sun is indeed supporting Mac development.
"OpenOffice.org discontinued its Aqua port in 2003, but restarted the project in February. And in May, OpenOffice.org's chief supporter, Sun Microsystems Inc., assigned two employee programmers to help."
The faqs on the Neooffice.org site
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/faq.php#11
Cite the lack of support from Sun as well as the complexities of coordination under the OOo banner - along with the Neooffice team's differences on licensing the OOo software - as reasons for separating from the OOo group.
Will the Neooffice team outline their future plans for Neooffice, given the restart of work on aqua at OOo - particularly with reference to how NeoOffice will be differentiated from an aqua OOo, in its workings and in its licensing?
Is there any plan to return to working under the OOo group, given the claimed Sun support renewal, and the statement from yourselves in the faqs that your differences about licensing are no longer important?
The answers to these questions will help me work out where my support dollars and attention to bug reporting should flow - when I manage to work out how to donate without using paypal, and from outside USA.
I am particularly interested in how you see your licensing working differently from that proposed by OOo. Does your licensing model involve single user licenses? If so, on what kind of model? Restricted, Open, Hybrid?
Is it possible that you are already working with OOo again?
thanks in advance for any attention you can give this.
I am looking forward to seeing an aqua Open Office, one way or the other.
edited to keep the link from breaking page layout -sa
Nothing in our plans changes because of this as this is not new news. This particular announcement is now the third year in a row that OOo has promised that they will have a native Mac OS X release "within the next year".
Even if this time they actually deliver as promised, the effect on the NeoOffice project can be boiled to to this: Mac users will continue to find the rapid support and bug fixing that the NeoOffice community provides or they won't. Software development is actually not the biggest amount of work that is required for something like NeoOffice; user support is a far larger amount of work.
That is what makes us different from OOo: we are a focussed communtiy that provides rapid support for the several hundred thousand NeoOffice users and every bit of our development is centered around eliminating problems for Mac users.
We will continue to do what we do as long as their is a need and our users continue to donate the necessary volunteer time or funds that are needed to keep the project running. I think it will be obvious when the NeoOffice project is not filling a need when 1) download volume falls signficantly and 2) the amount of support volunteers and donated funds falls significantly.
With that said, be aware that OOo is entirely funded by and largely controlled by Sun Microsystems. Not that that is a bad thing, but if your funds are limited, knowing that donations go to a Fortune 500 company may help you decide if donating to them is a good use of your limited funds.
You also can't give too much trust to a publication that states:
"That includes virtually all of OpenOffice.org's lead programmers and software testers, most of whom are based in Sun's Hamburg, Germany office, as well as OpenOffice.org's overall boss, Louis Suarez-Potts, who is the community's equivalent to Linux's Linus Torvalds."
Louis isn't the boss of anything. (at least not outside of his delusions)
Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 1:47 pm Post subject: thanks for the reply.
Patrick,
Your approach is much clearer to me now.
Let me tell you my approach, and why I'll not be joining your exciting project.
I'm a small office owner, with a few years of linux in various distributions, paid and volunteer communities, under my belt. I've also been a Firefox community member since it was Phoenix, and I'm still hanging in there with Camino - though I spend more time on their forums than I can really afford. My experience with Thunderbird/Eudora/Penelope and Debian has turned me into a seeker of more certainty than volunteer communities seem able to provide - - for my purposes anyway.
Of course the support for ware is just as important as the development, however my approach towards community development/support is that I don't like putting in the feedback and bug reporting time and energy in to projects - no matter how enthusiastic and energetic the community may be - if that community eventually declines and leaves me having put in work and money for an application that remains more beta in the end than is comfortable - leaving me having to start fresh with something new.
We've a couple of older ppc OS X machines here, and I'd like the users to have been able to finally get weaned off the use of the closed MS office ware and run an aqua OOo, now that OOo is so well developed and supported on the Windows and linux machines - I don't care who or what gets my money if they deliver the goods and support, big fat corporation or little boutique is all the same to me, and was consequently prepared to get behind your work once it was reported to me as being a stable and developing product. I'd have very much liked to say yes to the bookkeeper's proposal to install Neo.
But your statement of aims is just not clear enough for me to consider becoming part of the community; mere opposition to one large company, while working to provide/develop ware to be used on the platform bought from another large company doesn't make a bunch of sense.
All I get a flavour of here is Apple Computers don't like Sun and vice versa - and it's somehow naughty to want to make a profit.
Not wanting to go any further into the politics of licensing, I think that I'll back out slowly with the observation that the development of linux has taken off not as we had predicted, with the critical mass of involved users being reached - god knows there have been millions of us for years now - but with firstly the very concentrated corporate development put in by the Red Hat mob and their parallel Yellow Dog workers, while Debian's great plugging away in the volunteer end has been rewarded by being taken up by a wealthy philanthropist to see it get pushed **by that essential force that directed money can only give*** to the fast-maturing Ubuntu. The philanthropy model is the only one that has worked for any Open Source community project so far. Otherwise, the bullet of proprietary development just has to get bitten.
Where on earth would Firefox be now without the sustained final push it got from Google? I could whinge that fine UI control of cookies got taken away by that dirty big company and throw my Firefox out, I suppose.
But I just don't get that attitude.
I prefer the abundance model where everyone gives - and doesn't try to choke up the works with hard line prescriptions.
The tipping point for sustained development has been, in both cases, a concentrated business plan and nothing less.
It's most disappointing that Sun/Apple politics appears to have got in the way of some kind of certainty for the aqua OOo - or NeoO
The best of luck for your continued success at this project.
Finally, I don't seem to be able to find your accounting for donations any where on this site or the Neooffice.org one. If you could link to it, I'd be interested in the numbers, should my bookkeeper want to revisit the idea of installing Neooffice further down the track.
thanks for letting me use your forum, and I run the warehouse on a Solaris platform - which is a rocking bit of supported ware, that I pay for happily with luckily not-too-limited funds
Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 2:54 pm Post subject: Re: thanks for the reply.
NM wrote:
But your statement of aims is just not clear enough for me to consider becoming part of the community; mere opposition to one large company, while working to provide/develop ware to be used on the platform bought from another large company doesn't make a bunch of sense.
All I get a flavour of here is Apple Computers don't like Sun and vice versa - and it's somehow naughty to want to make a profit.
I didn't want to give the impression that we are opposed to Sun. We have merely found working within their structures very inefficient and inefficient. Ed and I worked within their structures full-time for 18 months or more each so I feel we had ample time to evaluate the pros and cons of doing a native port for a separate platform within and outside that structure.
My point about original response is that we have been filling a need for several hundred thousand people for 4+ years now and we will continue to do so until that need disappears or Sun's OOo Aqua releases fill it. I encourage you to try all options and if Sun's work is better, you should use it.
As for making a profit, I have no issues with that. In fact, I strongly believe that people should be paid for their efforts. In our case, however, the decision to use the "donation and volunteer" model was based on a realistic review of the business prospects of selling a competitor to MS Office and Apple iWork. The reality is that these products can sell because Microsoft and Apple 1) have made huge investments into the development of their products and 2) continue to make massive investments in the marketing of their products.
NeoOffice is not a concept that generates any interest from venture capitalists and such investors really are necessary to finance the huge investment to create a true competitor to either of the above products. Instead, we invested our time and, in return, ask our users to donate a reasonable amount to ensure that we can pay for infrastructure costs and a living wage and benefits for the core developers.
It doesn't sound very business-like, but I think it is how most small businesses throughout the world run. What is nice is that it seems to work. Of course, it took more investment than we originally expected to get where we are, but the model seems to now be self-sustaining.
I'm curious, have you looked at the code being released by Sun? Do you think it's better/worse/same as your solution using Java as a bridge? According to some slides from the OO conference they are working on turning OO into a real Cocoa app using XML and gorm to create .nib's, which sounds interesting.
Anyways, whatever the future of the code I hope this community keeps going as focusing on agile development for Mac users .
I'm curious, have you looked at the code being released by Sun? Do you think it's better/worse/same as your solution using Java as a bridge? According to some slides from the OO conference they are working on turning OO into a real Cocoa app using XML and gorm to create .nib's, which sounds interesting.
I periodically review their code for anything interesting or useful. In a few cases, some of it is pretty good code like the Mac OS X Address Book support.
However, my own opinion is that most of the other code is a bit "thin" and, in many cases, is not fully functional. Most of the easy stuff like creating a window and drawing a button are there, but there aren't many complex issues with those operations. By "thin" I mean that large swaths of functionality like printing, image copy/paste, font fallback, input method support, etc. that took us many solid months to implement are not implemented in their code at this time so there really is not much to see.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2007 11:12 am Post subject:
I check out Sun's code from time to time and I find it ironic that for some features such as the native widget support, they're essentially just recreating code that we've already written. Sure the constants may be named different and things in slightly different files, but it's essentially the same code written in a slightly different way. They aren't reinventing the wheel, they're just remodeling a slightly different wheel (perhaps putting on spinners too).
With a few notable exceptions (such as the address book support) the majority of Sun's work is an interesting engineering exercise. They may remove one level of function calls, la dee da. Our code is battlefield tested and proven, and that is what counts. At the end of the day what is really important is that code works *correctly*.
With a few notable exceptions (such as the address book support) the majority of Sun's work is an interesting engineering exercise. They may remove one level of function calls, la dee da. Our code is battlefield tested and proven, and that is what counts. At the end of the day what is really important is that code works *correctly*.
...and, IMHO, that someone is there to fix it when it doesn't work correctly. That work is generally tedious, time-consuming, and not much fun but it is extremely important and necessary to create a stable application.
...and, IMHO, that someone is there to fix it when it doesn't work correctly. That work is generally tedious, time-consuming, and not much fun but it is extremely important and necessary to create a stable application.
This really is one of the greatest things about NeoOffice. Unlike commercial software, you don't wait forever for a fix, and unlike most open-source software, you aren't just told to "use a nightly build." Instead, you get rapid turn-around with test-patches, which then are tested before releasing a "real" patch every couple of weeks. (And, you don't have to re-download an entire 100+ MB dmg for bug fixes; how novel!)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Jun 11, 2006 Posts: 481 Location: Great Britain
Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 1:26 am Post subject:
sardisson wrote:
Instead, you get rapid turn-around with test-patches, which then are tested before releasing a "real" patch every couple of weeks.
Yes, from what I've seen on these forums the speed, quality, and dedication of Ed and Patrick's customer support is truly commendable, something that many other software developers large and small could learn from. And IMHO this is integral to the success of Neo - would there be such a great community on these forums if Ed and Patrick didn't have such a positive attitude?
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
