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<img border="0" src="http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/20/ooo.gif" title="Ooo" alt="Ooo" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; float: right;" />Great news for Mac users, Sun Microsystems has announced it will be helping port [OpenOffice][3] to the Mac platform. While there are currently versions of OpenOffice that run under the X11 environment, there is no native version of OpenOffice for Mac.
Sun had previously said that it would not actively contribute to the Mac OpenOffice project but in the [blog post announcing Sun's support][1], Philipp Lohmann, a developer at Sun writes that the increasing market share and community support of the Mac platform helped bring about the change of heart.
>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.
Native OpenOffice support will be a boon to Mac users given that there is currently no compelling alternative to Microsoft Office for Mac.
We've looked at other MS Office alternative in the past, [including NeoOffice][2], but almost all of them have come up wanting. While OpenOffice is far from perfect, it is the most compelling alternative to MS Office on any platform.
With Sun now behind the project, hopefully the somewhat stalled [Mac OpenOffice][4] port will get off the ground and deliver Mac users an alternative to the Microsoft bondage.
[1]: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun_microsystems_engineering_joins_porting "Sun Microsystems joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac"
[2]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/01/mac_month_neoof.html "Mac Month: NeoOffice The Aqua Friendly MS Office Alternative"
[3]: http://www.openoffice.org/ "OpenOffice"
[4]: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.html "Mac OpenOffice project"
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