Tuesday January 31, 2006 NeoOffice 1.2 Released
This just in: Patrick's satisfied with the beta code and has released NeoOffice 1.2 - you can download it now if you're a Mac OS X user on PowerPC.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 31 2006, 03:24:11 PM PST )
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NeoOffice Tipping Point
I was chatting with Patrick Luby at the weekend and thought his story was worth telling here. Patrick is the main developer of NeoOffice, the other port of OpenOffice.org to the Macintosh OS X platform. I've been using NeoOffice ever since I switched to the Mac because it doesn't need X11 like the "official" port and because it it well integrated with OS X - there's font, printer, drag and drop and other integration, making the experience very close to any other OS X application. Patrick works by taking the "official" port and using his own unique mix of native and Java code to produce NeoOffice. Using the clause in the LGPL that allows it he licenses the whole thing under the GPL.
For quite some time now, Patrick has been dependent on donations from grateful NeoOffice users to keep the wolf from the door while he does the porting. At one point the donations were streaming in, allowing him to work full-time on NeoOffice and not have to take other contracts. But according to Patrick, publicity about the work of the "official" porting team around the time of OOoCon claiming they would achieve a full native port and ditch X11 led one or two key donors to believe Patrick's work was no longer needed, and as the end of the year approached, donations faded away.
Patrick went looking for a permanent job, and received some offers. He was about to accept one of them when he spotted that, in the Terms of Employment, he saw he could potentially be required to assign his copyrights to any personal programming project - like NeoOffice - over to the new employer. While the employer tried to assure Patrick that that would never happen, the risk was enough to make him wait just a little longer - who'd want to work in a job that could end up stealing your baby?
As 2006 has got started, the flow of contributions has picked up a little and an 'angel' donor has made a gift to him so he's decided to put off a full-time job for a while longer and get started on the port of OpenOffice.org 2.0 over to the NeoOffice framework, especially seeing as the X11 port of 2.0 is looking in good shape even on Intel (great work, team!). He plans to create both Intel and PowerPC versions. He'll start that once he has a full release of NeoOffice 1.2 finished (that's based on the last version of OO.o 1.1.5, with read-only support for ODF), which I gather could be really soon.
I thought those of you who, like me, depend on NeoOffice would want to know and perhaps consider tossing a few notes in Patrick's tip-jar so we can be the "tipping point" in all senses of the phrase. Free software developers have to live, after all.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 31 2006, 12:15:00 AM PST )
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