A week ago, in my OpenOffice.org conference report, I wrote that the X11 Mac Port was being abandoned in favor of a Cocoa version. Every bloody Mac site in the world picked this up as though it were a major news story, and now I hear from Patrick Luby, chief maintainer of NeoOffice/J, that as a result, the people who’ve been supporting his work are threatening to cut him loose. This is madness; at the moment, Neo/J is the only actual shipping version of OpenOffice that you can run on a Mac with the menus in the right place, with drag-&-drop and fonts that Just Work, and so on. This is going to remain the case for some time, because the task of switching over the current X11 version is going to be huge, slow, and high-risk. (Patrick was also mad because I said Neo/J was “behind”, and, without going into details of Java and OO.o versions, he’s got a point). So for the time being, I’m going to go on using and supporting and probably blogging about Neo/J, because that’s all there is. And I still think that Apple should take an interest in this work.
