Sun Microsystems joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac
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. — The MacOSX porting history is basically as old as OpenOffice.org itself.
Context & Ripple Effects
Sun's announcement puts corporate engineering weight behind what has been a volunteer-driven effort — the Mac OS X porting history is described by the project itself as basically as old as OpenOffice.org, meaning the Aqua-native build has lacked a dedicated backer since its inception. The move fits Sun's stated direction: the company set building an ecosystem around Linux as a strategic goal in February 2006 and released Java under unmodified GPL2 that November, both steps toward making Sun software run everywhere rather than only on Solaris and SPARC hardware.
The timing matters against Sun's financial backdrop — coverage through late 2005 described flat-lining stock and a customer base decimated by the dot-com crash, with Niagara-based servers launched in December 2006 as part of the recovery drive. Extending OpenOffice.org to the Mac is a low-cost way to widen the reach of Sun's office-software franchise onto Apple's growing installed base.
First-order effects
- Sun engineering resources are now directly committed to the Mac/Aqua port, giving the volunteer-led OpenOffice.org Mac effort vendor-backed development capacity it has never had.
- Mac users move closer to a native Aqua version of OpenOffice.org rather than the X11-based build, putting a free suite in more direct contact with Microsoft Office for Mac.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's Office-for-Mac business faces a credible zero-price alternative on OS X, pressuring the upgrade-cycle pricing that sustains it on Apple's platform.
- For Sun, a working Mac build makes OpenOffice.org and its commercial sibling StarOffice demonstrably cross-platform, supporting the ecosystem strategy behind its Linux push and its GPL Java release.
Third-order effects
- If vendor-backed ports become the norm, open-source desktop applications shift from hobbyist-supported curiosities to multi-platform products that compete with proprietary suites on every major OS at once.
- Sun's pattern — open-sourcing code to recruit platforms it does not control — points toward office productivity consolidating around document formats and suites that span Windows, Linux, and Mac, with lock-in migrating from the application to the file format.
The trend: Desktop productivity software is moving toward vendor-backed open-source suites that treat every major operating system, including the Mac, as a first-class target.