Visiting the Apple WWDC 2007

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Sunday, 17 Jun 2007

Visiting the Apple WWDC 2007

Philipp Lohmann

From Monday, June 11th to Friday 15th some of the OOo Mac porter team visited the Apple World Wide Developer Conference to get input from Apple's developers concerning our porting effort. We learned some rather important facts that will change the direction of our Mac port considerabley and Apple's developers and UI specialists gave us very constructive criticism; of course there is a lot to do to look like a Mac application since we currently have a more old fashioned interface.

So what did we learn ? Well foremost: Carbon is a dead track, we really need to change our application to utilize the Cocoa framework. This will cause us quite an effort, especially since our native widget framework won't work with Cocoa. The reason is simple: unlike Carbon which has a themed drawing API with HIToolbox, Cocoa won't let us simply draw controls (buttons, menus and so on), so either we have not native look (completely unacceptable) or we use real native controls. Welcome back to the glorious days of StarView (for those who were born in those olden days :-) ). Also, ATSUI is going the same way, being replaced by CoreText - which as of yet is not even feature complete from our point of view since it cannot yet extract glyph polygons.

There is however one bright light in this news: we can do the change gradually since Carbon can be called from Cocoa, so for a transitional phase we can use the NWF framework as is until we can get native controls to work (which will probably open a whole can of worms unfortunately).

Moreover we learned a lot of UI changes needed from a Mac user's point of view (see our report at the OOo wiki for details). Some of these changes would be beneficial for our other platforms, too, I think, but we will need to discuss with ux what we actually want to do.

Also I learned that an old hypothesis of mine is true: developers don't mix well with sunlight. On the sunday before WWDC I played a little at being a tourist and managed to get a massive sunburn. Please insert your favorite joke about a Sun developer getting burned by the sun here :-)

tags: mac openoffice.org porting wwdc

Posted by Philipp Lohmann on 17 Jun 2007 | PermaLink |

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Comments:

i have many times had the idea that if you change application's UI structure to be more mac-like, then that app actually benefits on other platforms, too. nice indeed.

Posted by sven on June 17, 2007 at 10:59 PM CEST #

for one simple example - i do not see any reason why OO.o can't on all platforms use apple's phrasing in dialog boxes: instead of "yes" and "no" use simply "save" and "discard" :)

Posted by sven on June 17, 2007 at 11:03 PM CEST #

I guess the NeoOffice folks knew all about that already. Are you folks working with them?

Posted by David Coldrick on June 18, 2007 at 06:40 AM CEST #

We cannot work with NeoOffice due to their licensing. They are GPL only, so we cannot accept their code into the OpenOffice.org code base which is LGPL. Regarding the "Yes/No" thing: other platforms have their conventions, too. We won't simply change OOo to look like mac everywhere, we want to have an integrated look on all platforms.

Posted by PhilippL on June 18, 2007 at 11:04 AM CEST #

Quote: "We cannot work with NeoOffice due to their licensing."

I have to respectfully disagree with the above statement. I believe it really should say "We choose not to work with NeoOffice due to their licensing." OpenOffice.org owns both the OpenOffice.org trademark and chooses its own licensing model so there is nothing that prevents OpenOffice.org from simply taking the NeoOffice code, swapping back in the OpenOffice.org name and splashscreen and releasing a GPL OpenOffice.org for Mac.

I understand if Sun or OpenOffice.org doesn't like the GPL. I even understand if you want to do your own Mac port only because it is fun and interesting. But saying that OpenOffice.org is prevented from using the NeoOffice code is quite a stretch. AFAIK neither Sun nor OpenOffice.org has any external third-party agreement that limits it from releasing any OpenOffice.org builds under the GPL so I am curious why the fact that NeoOffice is GPL is such a hindrance for Sun and OpenOffice.org.

Posted by pluby on June 19, 2007 at 07:17 PM CEST #

pluby: We chose LGPL for a reason, namely because it is less restrictive to everybody else. And releasing the MacPort of OOo under another license than the other ports would be just a nightmare for our users. If you want OOo to change to GPL instead of LGPL I suggest putting this motion forward to the OpenOffice.org council.

Posted by PhilippL on June 19, 2007 at 07:41 PM CEST #

I agree that your statement that the LGPL is less restrictive to others. Whether OOo as a whole is LGPL or GPL is irrelevant to me. I just wanted to point out that Sun and OOo have chosen not use existing GPL code and, instead, spend a not so trivial amount of money to reimplement the same functionality so that it can be available under the LGPL.

Fair enough. I am not going to try and convince you that the GPL is better for Sun or OOo's needs. But the use of LGPL does have a risk for OOo: that after Sun spends all the money and time to implement this functionality, a company will take the code and add proprietary enhancements that Sun will not be able to include in the OOo code. This has happened quite frequently in the past on the Windows, OS/2, and Linux platforms so it would not be a surprise if one or more proprietary Mac forks appear soon after OOo stabilizes the Mac code.

This is one of the reasons that Java now uses the GPL: to ensure licensees also open source their code and Sun will always have the option to pull the licensee's changes back into the main tree. The GPL also helped Konqueror force Apple to release their changes.

Again, I'm not trying to convince OOo that GPL is in their best interest as subsidizing development of proprietary forks may be a legitimate and valuable business strategy for Sun. The only difference for NeoOffice is that their is no benefit that we can see in subsidizing development proprietary forks. Hence, NeoOffice uses the GPL to force any forks of our code to also remain fully open source.

Posted by pluby on June 19, 2007 at 09:46 PM CEST #

pluby: I understand your concerns; basically this is the reason why SISSL was dropped. AFAIK the most important reason for choosing LGPL was similar to the reason glibs is LGPL: since we have a component framework and we wanted people writing components using OOo the reckoning is that more people will do so if we do not impose a license on them along with the API (as GPL would do). Also, you don't have to convince me :-) Personally I don't much care whether OOo is LGPL or changes to GPL. I'm just a developer and want to get things done, not argue legalese. However choosing of a license is a critical point to any open project and sure not a trifling thing. As I said, if you think that GPL would be a good thing for OOo, gather supporting voices and propose that to the community council; that would be the place where such a decision would be made. But as long as OOo is LGPL and NeoOffice is GPL there simply is no way OOo can take contributions from NeoOffice.

Posted by PhilippL on June 20, 2007 at 11:04 AM CEST #