but

I am seeing some searching for alternatives from businesses I deal with. The new licensing plan Microsoft is dictating to companies is not amusing the I.T. or Accounting people. Some might be forced to move to other products.

||| My name's RAM...

First off, Sun was very up front about their intentions to officially support and release StarOffice branded versions for Windows, Linux, and Solaris, long before OpenOffice.org was close to a 1.0 release. They have been similarly forward (until now) about their intentions to neither develop nor support a Mac OS X version of either OOo or StarOffice.

Second, Ed Peterlin basically obtained an admission from Joe Wilcox (the article's author) that the story was a rush job. He interviewed no OOo developers, and the general consensus on the porting-dev list is that he misinterpreted his quotes and bungled the story.

Apple's rep, Brian Crole, merely said, "We've been working with a lot of open-source developers out there. We've been aggressive in helping the community develop their own code, as well as move it over to our own platform. I think OpenOffice and eventually StarOffice really bears that out." That's just standard Apple boilerplate for "We're Open Source friendly." Frankly, I estimate that Apple's contribution to OpenOffice.org has been zero, publicly or privately.

Apple has had no developers participating publicly in the port to this point, nor has Sun had anyone submitting patches for the Mac port. If they are in fact working behind the scenes without sharing their work, it is extremely insulting to the work Ed and Dan have been doing - the whole point to having an Open Source project is that the process is transparent and inclusive. Holding back any work they may have been doing (not that I believe any such work exists) has only hurt overall progress by duplicating effort. If more Quartz-savvy engineers had been contributing before now, the port would be much further along than it currently is. Yes, there is a Quartz build of 638C which has been available since WWDC, but 638C is a milestone almost a year out of date. The work on 1.0 (milestone 641) so far has been limited to getting it to build and run on X11, and has only been in that phase for about 6 weeks.

If the quotes (and their interpretation) in this article are accurate, Sun and Apple better put up or shut up. What this smells like to me right now is Sun taking credit for work done entirely by volunteers. They'd do well to make it right, because the attitude on the porting-dev list right now is distinctly poor. If neither of them issues a clarifying statement, I wouldn't be too surprised to see the few developers that are working on the port quit.

Ed Peterlin and Dan Williams have been doing some extraordinary work, and I would like to see them get the credit they deserve, instead of a Sun flack claiming the credit for his team and thanking Apple, who has had no involvement whatsoever.

So without further ado, a .newsig for me. Will probably get annoying just a quickly.

Hmm... now I am considering using "After this long I'm numbed ;-)" as a .sig.

I don't suffer from insomnia--I enjoy every minute of it.

http://xml.openoffice.org

http://xml.opensource.org

I thought your SIG was more philosophical than funny. I look at it in terms of the war on drugs where "only outlaws get high". When people talk about why we shouldn't do drugs, they often mention how many people get killed and the crime it reinforces. Nobody mentions the deaths and the people sent to prison in former Soviet Russia for selling Bibles. Flash forward to 2002 where the DMCA and RIAA are trying to make "FREE" illegal, so that you must copyright and charge a fee for copyrighted works (witness the new ruling that is forcing radio stations broadcasting formerly copy free works having to pay licensing fees). So the next step is that all writings, because they could potential contain hacks to circumvent copy protection or could contain copyrighted writings and lyrics are in essance, circumventing DMCA. So therefore they should pay a licensing fee "just in case". Therefore, email would have to change to pay-per-read licensing--unless you did a copyright check and made sure your email did not infringe on prior art or contained a hack. All of this, of course, certified by Attorneys and Public Clerks.

So, your SIG is strangely funny in a frightening way, because if AOL was outlawed (in the same way as a facilitator of copyright infringement already is), then everyone receiving an email would be receiving a stolen good. Hence, everyone who "Got Mail" would be an outlaw.

If you want funny, try this; New security feature of AOL warns users of viruses with "You've Got Infected"

Of course, with all the dimwits thinking that these new laws are going to save even one life, may actually worry about disease transmission via email. I mean, the power grabs going on... It's like the security guard caught sleeping while the warehouse is emptied, using the excuse that if he had a machine gun, nothing would be stolen.

Whew! What a heavy sig...>

However, I think that sometimes these Open Source advocates are really "Pie in the Sky". Apple is based on sales, not on consulting. The only way to support open source initiatives with "Day Jobs" is with consulting. Little penneys from a lot of hands doesn't work for Apple either, since the numbers of Macs is relatively small.

Let's not get into this arguement that companies should work for free. There are very few examples of anyone creating good, consumer grade, polished works this way. Much less a platform, hardware and integrated applications.

However, I can see StarOffice as being "for free", mainly as a revenue spoiler/club against Microsoft. But as a "no-profit" software, it won't go too far.>

Better re-read that citation.

Q: What version of Java is included on Mac OS X?

A: The latest version of Java for Mac OS X is based on the J2SE 1.3.1 JDK with the HotSpot Client VM. The current version, which is the Java 1.3.1 Update 1 for Mac OS X 10.1, contains all of Sun's additions for JDK 1.3.1_02. The upcoming "Jaguar" release of Mac OS X will be JDK 1.3.1_04.

Q: When will Apple have an implementation of J2SE 1.4 available?

A: We're now providing an early version of our 1.4 implementation, the Java 1.4 Developer Preview, to all seeded ADC members. This pre-release has only been qualified against the WWDC Jaguar seed, and has not been qualified against any other seeds/builds. The product development cycle includes plans to seed a prerelease version of the J2SE v1.4.1 to developers. Specific dates for further releases have not been determined and are in part dependent upon Sun's release schedule.

Still, the idea of having a top-of-the-line Java implementation on a Mac and a relatively current one at that, well, it blows me away. We're still doing 1.2 at work, just began switching to 1.3 six months ago. The way this sounds, 10.2.1 could very well contain Java 1.4.

? Constitutionally Correct ?

It would be kinda cool to have a word processor called starword since wordstar started everything way back in the day...
"Terminal" is OS X's killer app.

mrg

Or, better yet, Apple start to incorporate Star Office into the Cocoa application kit. Already, Apple give APIs to read and write rich text, and the NSTextView gives basic word processor functionality.

Just imagine if Apple did all of the grunt work for making office type programs and bundled it into to OS... then developers could do all sorts of cool things building on top of Apple's APIs and pretty soon Apple would have programs running on their platform that were generations ahead of MS.

Apple can get a lot of the benefits of open source by simply adding on to the application kit. Developers can use software that apple writes in their own projects without apple giving away the source code... and apple doesn't have to worry about one of their competitors using their own code against them.
"Terminal" is OS X's killer app.

This will be terrific for someone (like me) who wants half-way decent M$ interoperability, but don't expect wonders here. Star Office is only second rate at best, and if Apple starts shipping it free on all Macs you can bet M$ will start "revising" the file formats again to be incompatible.

While I welcome this, because my word processing needs are pretty sparse to begin with, there is no way that Sun/Apple can afford to keep Star Office up to date enough to please the hardcore Office Suite users. The only way I see this working is if Apple rolled their AppleWorks development team into this effort, and really produced something that could compete feature per feature with MS Office.

The problem with that is that Apple would not make the results of such an effort open source, or free (except perhaps on their systems only), which would probably violate most of the Star Office licensing agreements.

--Whereever you go - there you are!

Who pissed in your Wheaties? And how is it that you lambast me for supposedly assuming something about what Sun would or wouldn't do, then two sentences later you say I'm sure Apple would give back some of the improvements at least. How do *you* know that?

"Folks, the Mac platform is through... ." - John C. Dvorak, 1998

Well, today we have a well entrenched (though not widely distributed) Office v. X. It's even Aquafied. Everyone that wanted to know about v. X knows about v. X. Those that wanted/needed it have paid dearly for it.

Office v. X is on thousands of Macs running OS X, and doing it fairly well with the recent service release. Very nice timing, Apple. What's M$ going to do? Pull Office v. X off the shelves? They might stop further development (what the hell excuse are they going to use, though?), but they're not going to stop selling it.

The cat's out of the bag. Apple coaxed it out and now they're building another cat to loose on M$. Anyone for a cat fight? Kramer, you still out there?

This would have immediate effect of generating more goodwill with the Open Source community. Giving back to the community by strengthening StarOffice would make more and more "Alpha Geeks" want to use and develop with OS X.

The long-term effect of working with Sun to strengthen StarOffice is that it would help to commoditize office software. One of the reasons MS has been able to make boatloads of money over the years is that they charge you for the OS, get you locked into it, then they continue to charge you for your office applications as well. But what if there was an alternative office suite that was free or dramatically less expensive, of high quality, and available on many different OSes?

This would provide more incentive for PC users to look at the operating system as a discrete component of the overall computing equation. When you compare OSes, frequently PC users say, "well, Windows isn't great, but it's so tightly integrated with Office, and *together* they work really well."

Decouple the OS from the office suite, by providing an option other than Office, and the whole dynamics of selecting a desktop OS might change. Any time the decisionmaking paradigm changes, that's an opportunity for Apple to insert itself into the picture, by calling attention to the advantages of the MacOS.

It's just an idea, and I doubt that Apple will go that far. My guess is this is just insurance at this point, since the Apple/MS relationship has gotten pretty sour pretty fast. But it would