History of NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org

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1 Brief Overview and History of OpenOffice.org and the NeoOffice projects - Page 2

Brief Overview and History of OpenOffice.org and the NeoOffice projects - Page 2

This overview and history consists of several pages. Click on the links above or below the text to move to the previous or next section.

Introduction

History of OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X

The software applications we know today as OpenOffice.org (OOo) and its Mac version OpenOffice.org Mac OS X (X11), Neolithic Office (NeoOfficeÂ®/C), and Neolithic Office for Javaâ„¢ (NeoOfficeÂ®/J) have their roots in StarOfficeâ„¢, a suite of office applications for Windows and various UNIX platforms created by the German company StarDivision in the late 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, hoping to use StarOffice to compete with Microsoft Office. In October 2000, Sun open-sourced the code to the forthcoming version of the suite, StarOffice 6.0, creating OpenOffice.org (an open-source community and a software application suite). This code included a partial port of StarOffice to Mac OS X, which formed the basis for OpenOffice.org on the Mac, as well as the two NeoOffice projects.

OpenOffice.org is an extraordinarily large project, consisting of over eight million lines of code. While as an open source project anyone is able to contribute code to OpenOffice.org, in practice the lionâ€™s share of the development of core office program features is done by an entire "small company" of Sun engineers, the former StarDivision employees, who are paid to work solely on the project for release as Sunâ€™s StarOffice suite. These engineers also maintain the Windows, Solaris, and Linux versions of OpenOffice.org and have the resources to keep up with the constant volume of changes they create.

By contrast, the number of developers actively working on all forms of OpenOffice.org on the Mac is fewer than a half-dozen at any given time. Since 2000, a small number of dedicated, volunteer developers have toiled over the OOo code in their free time, and, aided by a slightly larger group of volunteer testers and forum members providing "user support," produced Mac OS X-native versions (aka OpenOffice.org/X11) of OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2. OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 ran on Mac OS X 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3, while version 1.1.2 supported Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3. While these versions of OOo are native Mac OS X applications in the sense they are PowerPC code and do not require a software emulator (such as VirtualPC, used on the Mac for running Windows applications designed for Intel processors), their appearance reflects the suiteâ€™s UNIX roots, running under X11, a common windowing system on UNIX platforms (Aqua would be a rough Mac OS X equivalent).

For each release, some combination of four primary developers (Kevin B. Hendricks, Patrick Luby, Edward H. Peterlin, and Dan Williams) have spent several hundred hours just to get OpenOffice.org to build and be relatively stable on Mac OS X with X11.

In addition, Terry Teague wrote the Start OpenOffice.org application, included with the official Mac OS X releases of OpenOffice.org, which reduced complex UNIX/terminal commands for launching OOo to a true double-click. Start OpenOffice.org also provided integration of OOo under X11 with the Mac OS X Finder, allowing OOo documents to have Finder icons, supporting drag-and-drop and double-click opening of documents, and an drag-and-drop method of converting and installing Macintosh for use with OOo. Start OpenOffice.org is also updated for each release of OOo and to support new X11 options.

Because of the chaotic, constantly-changing nature of the OpenOffice.org code, limited support from the larger OOo community, the limited number of developers capable of working equally as well in the UNIX/X11 and Mac/Cocoa/Aqua worlds, and limited resources, the Mac porting team has focused on releasing X11-based Mac versions of stable OpenOffice.org major releases. Fortunately, this team has been strengthened in the OOo 2.0 cycle by new volunteers and contributors such as Eric Hoch, Eric Bachard, Florian Heckl, Nakata Maho, Pavel JanÃk, Alexander von Below and others.