I have waited for insiders coming out to speak about Gobe Productive on this topic. While an OpenOffice on Haiku must definitely be a remarkable event in the Haiku history yet to come, the underlying porting task would be enormous, and time-consuming that is imaginable even to the layman.
As an occasional user in the past, I found GP3 for Win impressive, light, fast, highly integrated and interoperable in its components and highly compatible with MS Office at least up to XP version. The last point need not be over stressed if any potential user should be given the incentive to stay royal, as one is still expected to communicate with MS Office.
The following is quoted from a interview in 2002 with the ex-boss of Gobe Software, Bruce Hammond, among others things, on making GP3 for Win compatible with BeOS, where he replies: “I think that there is some work involved to bring GP 3.x to BeOS, but it is not a mind-bending amount of work - it is straight forward stuff for the most part…” (http://www.osnews.com/story/1520).
Technicality answered, however, would the wait for the code holders to become interested a passive hope to meet the short term need for Haiku.
EDIT: I needed not to have written above had I read the message from AndrewZ above, which was posted almost at the same time (the apparent time difference is due to the time zones we are at(?)). But it’s still worth to vote for AndrewZ’s suggestion. With AndrewZ’s information that Haiku developer Stippi is also a code holder other than Blue Lotus, what good news is better than this towards a viable modern office suite for Haiku. Thanks, AndrewZ.
[quote=AndrewZ]I would like to take this opportunity to recommend that we put up a bounty and port GOBE Productive 3 to Haiku. Stippi has the source code, under an NDA to GOBE. If we put up a bounty he could find the time. It is an excellent Office suite with amazing features and it is native to BeOS. Here’s a detailed review:
My personal feeling is that we should have multiple Office packages for Haiku, choice is good. But primary efforts should be put in GOBE Productive, because it is native, and full featured. This software would run on netbooks like greased lightning.[/quote]
If you do this, bring gobe to Haiku in a dialy ,functional, stable version. It will give haiku a in to small bussiness's who would be able to offer up alot of support money. Most of us small bussiness owners are tired of dealing with Microsoft,code bloat and now everything runs in .net crippling older, yt still useable hardware.
I for one would be willing to contribute, if the developer is interested in doing the work and has a reasonable timeline.
My other question is will he do both a gcc4 and ggc2 version and when does haiku expect to reasonably break away from ggc2 ? At some point this becomes a mandatory item ?
I should point out that no Haiku developer has committed to doing anything with GOBE Productive. Stippi has the code but that’s it.
I personally use Office 2010 every day. It is well designed and works well. But you do need a Dual core PC with minimum of 2 GB of RAM.
Two things need to happen to start the GOBE Haiku port, not in any particular order:
Get an estimate of coding effort from Stippi
Start bounty in Haikuware
[quote=AndrewZ]I should point out that no Haiku developer has committed to doing anything with GOBE Productive. Stippi has the code but that’s it.
I personally use Office 2010 every day. It is well designed and works well. But you do need a Dual core PC with minimum of 2 GB of RAM.
Two things need to happen to start the GOBE Haiku port, not in any particular order:
Get an estimate of coding effort from Stippi
Start bounty in Haikuware[/quote]
I would state the obvious again, not to be rude but to renforce something fundemental. Without applications that the end user can capitolize on, The user base will remain small. If Hiaku is to succeed it needs to get something that small bussiness uses.Expanding use to small bussiness would be the best way to get haiku some serious footprint into the market. With that footprint will come $$$ and a demand for support, both of which enable haiku to grow into a viable alternative OS.
I am in agreement with this. A little bit of Haiku history here. For 9 years, most of the Haiku project has been focused on writing and debugging the OS. Most of the core Haiku developers are OS guys who have been focused on the OS for those 9 years. There is still a lot of work remaining to bring Haiku to Release 1.0.
That being said, Haiku has enough basic features and is stable enough for leading edge users to use. There are guys who are switching over to Haiku as their ‘daily’ OS. This is a really good sign. We are moving into a new era for Haiku. This one involves more focus on applications, in addition to the OS.
The new focus on applications takes several forms:
Revisiting and testing older BeOS applications (see Haikuware.com)
Bringing new developers in to create new applications on Haiku
Getting developers to port cross-platform apps (OO, KOffice, AbiWord, etc)
Getting a core Haiku developer to port GOBE Productive
The OS is stable, the tools work, the API is excellent, we need apps, so start evangelizing Haiku to developers.
I know of at least three Haiku developers that signed an NDA with Gobe to get access to the code with the ultimate purpose of producing a GP 3.0 for Haiku binary (Stippi was not among them). The agreement was that the devs would do the work pro bono and in exchange Gobe would make the resulting Haiku binary available for free (gratis). That sounds like a commitment based on a gentlemen agreement to me.
[quote=simonwong]I have waited for insiders coming out to speak about Gobe Productive on this topic. While an OpenOffice on Haiku must definitely be a remarkable event in the Haiku history yet to come, the underlying porting task would be enormous, and time-consuming that is imaginable even to the layman.
As an occasional user in the past, I found GP3 for Win impressive, light, fast, highly integrated and interoperable in its components and highly compatible with MS Office at least up to XP version. The last point need not be over stressed if any potential user should be given the incentive to stay royal, as one is still expected to communicate with MS Office.
The following is quoted from a interview in 2002 with the ex-boss of Gobe Software, Bruce Hammond, among others things, on making GP3 for Win compatible with BeOS, where he replies: “I think that there is some work involved to bring GP 3.x to BeOS, but it is not a mind-bending amount of work - it is straight forward stuff for the most part…” (http://www.osnews.com/story/1520).
Technicality answered, however, would the wait for the code holders to become interested a passive hope to meet the short term need for Haiku.
EDIT: I needed not to have written above had I read the message from AndrewZ above, which was posted almost at the same time (the apparent time difference is due to the time zones we are at(?)). But it’s still worth to vote for AndrewZ’s suggestion. With AndrewZ’s information that Haiku developer Stippi is also a code holder other than Blue Lotus, what good news is better than this towards a viable modern office suite for Haiku. Thanks, AndrewZ.[/quote]
I haven’t use open office in years. but my last impressions of it were less then favorable. Several things came to mind.
Loads of bloat, installs and behaves like spamware, install to much crap, generally ran poorly and crashed alot.
[quote=tonestone57]
Linux Kernel is actually written in C. Um, very close. C++ just extends C or maybe you’re too dumb to realize that?[/quote]
“C++ just extends C” is at best a lie-to-children. Stroustrup began by adding classes to C, he added new reserved words which immediately made the new language incompatible. But C++ continued to expand and further incompatibilities were introduced, some accidental and many deliberate. Some C features, particularly to do with the naming of symbols and function prototypes are available in C++ via the extern “C” { } mechanism, but others are not available at all. Both languages continue to evolve separately, and compiler extensions also differ (e.g. the GNU C dialect has separate extensions from the GNU C++ dialect).
Rather than calling people who point out factual mistakes “dumb” you might do well to learn from those mistakes.
[quote]The agreement was that the devs would do the work pro bono
and in exchange Gobe would make the resulting Haiku binary available for free (gratis)[/quote]
it could be cool, but is Gobe Productive supporting the ODF format?
maybe you could try again, the loadtime has increased much.
I’m using it on a daily basis, and no crash for me when using the official version.
There is also a lighter version called OOo4kids with remove things such as the database module.
[quote=farvardin][quote]The agreement was that the devs would do the work pro bono
and in exchange Gobe would make the resulting Haiku binary available for free (gratis)[/quote]
it could be cool, but is Gobe Productive supporting the ODF format?
maybe you could try again, the loadtime has increased much.
I’m using it on a daily basis, and no crash for me when using the official version.
There is also a lighter version called OOo4kids with remove things such as the database module.[/quote]
I could but I doubt I will, First off its a platform ledge to nowhere ins my sitaution, secondly we run MS windows machnies becuase they have the software we need.Linux isn’t a option , so we wait for a viable alternative to MS offerings. Brining GOBE in would be a huge huge huge leap for Haiku and I would suggest that the developers find a way to make it happen.
Good apps attract clients, clietns bring $$$, money brings stability and more coders and performance.
[quote=farvardin][quote]The agreement was that the devs would do the work pro bono
and in exchange Gobe would make the resulting Haiku binary available for free (gratis)[/quote]
it could be cool, but is Gobe Productive supporting the ODF format?[/quote]
I have no idea. Anyway, it may be too late now, as Gobe’s business does not seem to be particularly thriving (check out their website @ gobe.com or gobe.in).
Gobe went to India hoping to sell low cost office suite there. Way better deal compared to Microsoft Office.
But with OpenOffice and Abiword they may have hard time competing. Who wants Gobe’s when they can get office software for free?
MacOS X also started off with non-native OpenOffice. After which they updated it to use native GUI.
Haiku could do the same except it would require X which I am against bringing to this OS. You bring X and you make this OS similar to Linux. Of course, this would be 3rd party add-on but I think we can do without it.
[quote=tonestone57]Gobe went to India hoping to sell low cost office suite there. Way better deal compared to Microsoft Office.
But with OpenOffice and Abiword they may have hard time competing. Who wants Gobe’s when they can get office software for free?
MacOS X also started off with non-native OpenOffice. After which they updated it to use native GUI.
Haiku could do the same except it would require X which I am against bringing to this OS. You bring X and you make this OS similar to Linux. Of course, this would be 3rd party add-on but I think we can do without it.[/quote]
the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. To much work to port OpenOffice and a hole bunch of other problems trailing right behind it.
From interview: "But returning to OpenOffice, I have divided porting of this enormous
application into few phases. The first phase includes compiling and
running using Gtk+ (using the X server). The second phase consists of
compiling and running using Qt (without the X server). The third and
last phase is the native port, analogical to what happens to Abiword.
After a long fight the first phase has been reached, so we have
OpenOffice available on Haiku in a X server window.
After finishing with clang I plan on returning to the OpenOffice topic
and starting the second phase. I will not even try approaching the
third phase, since in my opinion it’s about a few months of work
full-time, not really for one person only."
If he does the Qt port with no X server, like stated in his interview, that would be very welcome addition to Haiku! Qt runs very good on Haiku and is a nice toolkit. Qt fits right in with Haiku.
From interview: "But returning to OpenOffice, I have divided porting of this enormous
application into few phases. The first phase includes compiling and
running using Gtk+ (using the X server). The second phase consists of
compiling and running using Qt (without the X server). The third and
last phase is the native port, analogical to what happens to Abiword.
After a long fight the first phase has been reached, so we have
OpenOffice available on Haiku in a X server window.
After finishing with clang I plan on returning to the OpenOffice topic
and starting the second phase. I will not even try approaching the
third phase, since in my opinion it’s about a few months of work
full-time, not really for one person only."
If he does the Qt port with no X server, like stated in his interview, that would be very welcome addition to Haiku! Qt runs very good on Haiku and is a nice toolkit. Qt fits right in with Haiku.[/quote]
I will take a look at it later. I am talking to a few pressional software suppliers about using haiku as a windows alternatives. Most of them do not want to contiue investing in the more closed microsoft architecture and the exspense of the developmenet kits.
Especially considering haiku could be “in some way bundled” with their software to release on. I have spoken to 4 companys today about this and all were receptive. All 4 asked me to forward developer information.
If we as a group can make it easy for them to migrate.
They will, in droves.
Trust me. There are alot of company that do not wish to deal with microsoft anymore.
I, like many others, would not be opposed to such ports for short-term solutions to real, everyday computing problems.
But there can be no arguing that the real need is for a new, native Haiku app (or app suite) to create similar functionality in a distinctly Haiku way.
What excites me about working on Haiku is the ability to create new, well-designed, clean, minimalistic apps that I valued highly in Mac OS, with a better API design.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing new apps that reproduce functionality on other systems - but in a new idiom. It used to be the norm, and in some ways, it is the ideal for Haiku.
Haiku, Like BeOS, is as much about philosophy of app and OS design as it is about practical use and functionality. I don’t think sacrificing core tenets in the name of pragmatism is worth it, IMHO.
OpenOffice community has created a new Project called LibreOffice since oracle seems to be non communicative about some projects… Anyway i think that it would be a good moment to create a official Haiku version of it.
I just wanted to say that OpenOffice only uses Java for some wizards, and I personally have never used those wizards, nor do I know anyone who has. I think that code is wholly non-critical.
I’d like to add that, however, having a JVM running on BeOS/Haiku would be a very useful thing. Java is a nice language, quite popular for many tasks, especially server side, but then there is a host of other languages running in the JVM.
Finally, I would like to remind you that BeOS does have a native office suite (so go be productive with it, already ).
).