View this article at: http://dev.macnn.com/articles/07/05/03/sun.openofficeorg.on.mac
Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:50pm

Sun to help port OpenOffice...

A Sun Microsystems developer has revealed via a blog post that Sun will help port Open Office to Mac OS X. "I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort," wrote Sun developer Philipp Lohmann. "You can imagine my excitement when I first heard about renewed efforts to make an Aqua port reality. And now finally I can spend my paid time to add to this great effort." Lohmann notes that there was a plan to offer a native version of Open Office for Mac practically from the start, but adds that the community decided to produce an X11 port as a first step. The blogger says Sun is joining the Mac porting project because Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space, and the company's notebooks are appearing more and more at various locations such as conferences and airport lounges.

"At first Herbert Dürr and I will contribute to the Mac port, however there certainly will be other Sun developers involved in their areas of expertise when the need arises (e.g. when problems with the build system arise)." Lohmann says the first step for he and his colleague is to get an overview about the current state of the work on Open Office for Mac OS X, and predicts that event handling as well as painting will likely be their first objective. Lohmann brings roughly 10 years of experience with vcl to the porting effort, while Dürr specializes in Text drawing via SalLayout implementations.