OpenOffice 3.0–How to Get it Early, Including for the Mac
webworkerdaily.com
webworkerdaily.com
However, this is a feeble effort compared to the far superior NeoOffice port. Slow, ugly; it looks like it was thrown together very quickly. I 'm crossing my fingers that at some point OpenOffice treats the Mac platform as a first-class citizen. Until then, I'll stick with NeoOffice.
This is the first time that the killer apps that would make me want to buy a new computer are all open source. The new open office, the new gimp, etc.
First of all, since there is no package management to speak of, you often run into dependency hell (A requires B requires C requires D ...). Thankfully, we have macports (think of it like a limited version of apt) to get around most of those problems.
The real issue, for graphical apps at least, is that X11 apps don't look and feel like native Mac apps which run on Quartz (correct me if I'm mistaken).
There a bunch of things from the system call level (eg, Linux specific locking methods) to the UI level (Macs don't use freedesktop.org specs, instead they have their own standards).
So things need to be ported, and that's why there's less OSS software for Macs.
A "Native" OS X application should (largely) follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines[1], but the same application following those guidelines in another operating system would probably feel out of place. Hence the need to "port".
This applies less to command line tools etc, since they don't need a GUI and can just follow POSIX CLI standards to fit in.
[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conc...
But in all seriousness, Open Office is such an awesome product, I just hope 3.0 works well on the Mac.