Sun Joins Mac Port of OpenOffice.org

Further signs of Sun's broad commitment to open source and OpenOffice.org:

I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.

The MacOSX porting history is basically as old as OpenOffice.org itself. Practically from the start there was the plan to have a native version for Mac, however as a first step the community decided to produce an X11 port which - since OOo already had several X11 ports from the start - seemed to be a good way to get a version quickly as temporary solution. As usual the "temporary solution" tended to be quite long lived (year 2000 bug anyone :-) ?).

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Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port.

(Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

NeoOffice 2.0 Beta

One of the under-appreciated qualities of free software is its cross-platform nature. The fact that Firefox and OpenOffice.org are available for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux gives it a unique advantage. This makes the arrival of the beta version of NeoOffice 2.0, particularly important because, as this article explains:

Although OpenOffice.org 2.0 is available for OS X, it is an X11 binary. NeoOffice uses a fully native Aqua interface, is integrated with OS X system services such as clipboard, drag-and-drop, and Spotlight, and uses OS X's font, printing, and internationalization subsystems.