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Sun to Support OOo Mac OS X Port

Until now, the efforts to port OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X were entirely volunteer-driven projects, without any major corporate sponsorship or full-time developers, just interested and motivated programmers working in their free time.

NeoOffice and the Mac Porting Project have been working hard for years, but with official support from Sun just announced, there are now two full-time, paid developers dedicated to the project.

A lot of us Mac users have been waiting for this for a long time! And now Sun’s decided the time is right.

Philipp Lohmann, one of the two Sun developers, writes:

“Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port. The new invigorated effort in Mac/Aqua-porting (basically since CWS aquavcl01) is an obvious indicator. I think this is the right way to go to make OOo on Mac as good as or even better than the other ports. Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from Sun’s point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to be multi-platform capable.”

This is great news for everyone involved! It also lends support to my feeling that OpenOffice (and derivatives) will achieve majority market share on OS X someday soon.

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