Re: USA states' proposal to force port of MS Office to free platforms

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 12:19:52PM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Alan Cox">
> >
> > > It would have no impact either way. It will be
> > > 	-	as late as they can avoid getting slammed in court for
> > > 	-	unusably buggy (with them blaming the libraries/kernel/gnome..)
> > > 	-	incredibly slow (with them blaming the same)
> > >
> > > and always lag the windows one massively so as to suck users back to windows
> > > because "we needed the new release"
> >
> > The Mac version of MS Office is none of these things... It's actually well
> > integrated with the platform, fast, and arguably better than their Windows
> > version. [1]
> >
> > Apart from having an enormously hairy platform to integrate with, what's
> > stopping them doing the same for *nix?
> 
> ...the fact that the MacOS uses a different CPU than Windows, but Linux
> uses the same.  MS doesn't have a shot at selling the Windows OS to Mac
> users to install on their box, but they sure as heck don't want to risk
> making it easier for people to buy Linux instead of Windows for their x86
> hardware.

  Well. Remember IE had been ported to Solaris, MS reluctantly did it
at the time because they were forced by customers which were arguing that
Netscape was cross platform, and were refusing to switch because of this.
  From what I have heard that port was slow, buggy, etc. They were forced
but hadn't a clear interest in selling it. And it died as soon as the 
constrain disapeared.
  I don't expect any useable MS office suite on Linux anytime soon, at least
not until they have a very clear financial incentive to do so.

  In a nutshell: stop dreaming, and reports bugs on existing efforts like
		 OpenOffice, gnumeric, abiword etc.

Daniel

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