An inside look at StarOffice for Mac

You probabley have heard of Sun ;-). You may have heard of Sun's productivity suite, StarOffice: a free, state-of-the-art suite that aims to cut Microsoft's dominance of the office environment through features, price, and presence in all significant operating systems.

Well, now you will know what Sun's StarOffice people think of the Mac and what they're doing to become our tool of choice :-). At the end of October we managed to locate the people responsible for the application's Mac version (Mrs Jeffries) as well as those in charge of the portings and the OpenOffice effort (Mr Roth). They were kind enough to answer us, and this is what came from the process. A usual, the Spanish version has been up for a month now (this is a sahmeless plug for you to keep abreast of what we publish... and run BabelFish if necessary ;-) ).

Just a clarifying note: the Mac version is not being developed through the Open Source part of the initiative but as a regular StarOffice product.

October 24th, 2000

Question: What is the goal of the OpenOffice.org porting project?

Answer: The goal of this project is to:

1. Standardize the APIs and XML file formats

2. Build a reference implementation for other to use

3. Allow 3rd party ports to platforms Sun is not doing

4. Allow localizations in languages Sun is not doing.

5. Drive quality up.

6. Build a community around the APIs and file formats

Question: Is there a Mac porting going on? How about Mac OS X?

The Mac port of StarOffice is currently in development with the goal of shipping by June, 2001. It is based on the next version of StarOffice and is being created for OS X using Cocoa.

Question: Any comments on Mac OS X version? Difficulties, stages, people involved, people needed...

Answer: We are looking forward to adding another platform to StarOffice, allowing people to access their data no matter what type of computer they use.

Question: Are you getting any sort of support from Apple?

Answer: Sun is working with Apple in several areas to ensure that StarOffice best meets the needs of Apple customers.

Question: How can interested developers get in touch with the porting project (or any other)?

Answer: Info for our porting project can be found at: http://porting.openoffice.org/.

Question: What is, from your point of view, the role of open source in a multiplatform world?

Answer: Ports! At a high level the role of source, in the absence of Java, is to allow people to port to another platform.

Question: Do you know Apple's open-source Darwin OS project? What do you think of it?

Answer: Like Sun's OpenOffice initiative, Darwin is a great opportunity to expand and improve technology.

Question: Any other comments?

Answer: Yes: We believe that StarOffice will do for productivity what Linux did for Operating Systems.