Re: [tlug] Linux on Japanese TV News

[Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@example.com>]

On 29 janv. 07, at 11:20, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Dave Brown writes:
>
> > For MacOS X, you should be using NeoOffice, which is OpenOffice
> > with proper Macintosh widgets.  It's perfectly acceptable on my G4
> > Cube with its blazingly-fast 450MHz CPU.
>
> What do you mean by "is OpenOffice"?  It's a derivative of the same
> codebase, with no variants except in display widgets?  Is it
> reasonably up-to-date with the parent codebase, if so?  Does it seem
> likely to stay that way (ie, it has an organization with sane
> management and development muscle behind it)?  And what does
> "acceptable" mean?  Is that your personal opinion, or is that the
> consensus of an organization of 10,000 members?

The 2 persons in charge of the app are the ones who originally ported  
OOo to OSX when they were at SUN.

They left SUN when exploring options to remove dependencies on X11  
and they found Java as a solution.

Currently NO is based the OOo stable code base and updates it a few  
months after OOo has been updated. So right now OOo is at version 2.1  
and NO is at version OOo 2.0.

On Mac, NO gets the input services from OSX, so you can use it right  
away in Japanese, Arabic etc, while you'd have to install all sorts  
of input services on the X11 side for OOo/Mac to work similarly.

Basically the looks are the same except that NO behaves more like a  
Mac app (the menu sticks to the top of the screen etc).

It is considered by the respective communities that NO is useful  
while the OOo/Mac team works on creating a fully carbon OOo without  
X11 (bth, such version is not even released in alpha form so I doubt  
anyone has used it on this list). When OOo/Carbon will be released  
for Mac it is very possible that the two apps will diverge more since  
OOo/carbon will likely evolve along the SUN line. A big difference  
between the two is that OOo is LGPL and NO is GPL.

NO works on a donation system and it seems they have enough cash  
right now to go on for a while. User base is relatively important  
since it is widely recognized as _the_ Mac version of OOo by anyone  
but the OOo community. Communities when you don't need complex input  
systems can forget about the fact that they use X11 all day, but  
communities that require such systems usually advertise NO as the OOo  
for Mac (the Japanese OOo community has no problem at all with NO,  
but the French community is constantly at war with the NO team it  
seems...)

Etc etc.

Considering how quickly the OOo/carbon dvp has evolved, I'd say we  
could have an alpha build by the summer and a stable release within  
12 months. It looks like SUN's OOo base (the offices of StarOffice in  
Hamburg) have acknowledged the existence of the project and have  
started supporting it, although I don't know to which extent. So I'm  
confident OOo for Mac/carbon will be released (especially since MS  
has declared that MSO/Mac will not support VBA-> not serious  
competition on the Mac side and Novel is working on VBA support for  
OOo -> stuff that will be included first in NO it seems).

All the rest of the story is on the OOo lists.

> Remember, that's where this thread started: discussion of migrating an
> organization of some size (in my case, about 10,000, with a half-dozen
> clusters of 50 members each being my guess at the necessary scale to
> start the ball rolling) away from Windows/Word/Excel.  What I want is
>
>   o a cross-platform suite
>   o possibilities of migration to Linux or similar without changing
>     the look/feel, preferably the brand, of the office suite
>   o acceptable handling of Windows/Word and Windows/Excel docs,
>     where "acceptable" means that document formatting and glyph
>     spacing does not change visibly on screen or printed page, that
>     the WYSIWYG correspondence between screen and page is pretty well
>     maintained, and that documents round-trip will in both directions
>     (ie, both A -- copy --> B -- edit --> B -- copy --> A and
>     B -- copy --> A -- edit --> A -- copy --> B and work without  
> loss).
>   o live demo without install
>
> for the purpose of convincing people who *are* dependent on office
> suites.  They will be using platforms of a broad range of power,
> configuration, and OS.  They will continue to do so; there is no way
> that there will be an organization-wide standard platform.
>
> Open Office intends to be that cross-platform suite.  My experience
> strongly suggest that s/in/pre/ is an appropriate transformation at
> the moment.

Well, get them OOo for Linux/WIndows and NO for OSX Macs.


Jean-Christophe Helary