Applixware Office

[Mike Meyer]

In <Pine.BSF.4.53.0304120755180.23176 at ns.tw.com>, Tom Wadlow <wadlow at tw.com> typed:
> I've gotten the 5.0 binaries to run under 4.5, but there was some minor
> weirdness required.  They don't trivially run under 4.7 and it is clear that the
> weirdness needed is increasing as OS and binaries drift further apart.  That is
> a curve that will one day become too steep to play on.  I've considered
> switching to something like OpenOffice.org, but I've got a lot of Applixware
> stuff around, and it is considerably more lightweight than OO.  At the very
> least it would be helpful to run them side by side on the same machine for a
> while to help convert things.

FWIW, I've got Applixware 5.0 running on 4.8-PRERELEASE. It requires
hacking some support code and using LD_PRELOAD to provide the
functionality that is no longer in the libraries that applix uses. I
can let you have that if you want it.

I've been contemplating the move to OpenOffice as well, and would be
interested in any answers to the questions you asked.

> So my question is this:  What is the status of Applixware with regards to
> FreeBSD?  The original company appears to be out of business or vastly changed.
> I believe that the Desktop Edition version was generated after the company
> went away.  Does somebody in the FreeBSD world have source?  Is that source
> available generally?  If not generally, is it being maintained?  If not, is
> it in search of a maintainer?

The Applixware product line still exists, and has been renamred to
"Anyware." It's a product of VistaSource, and you can find more
information about it at <URL: http://www.vistasource.com/page.php?id=7
>. The problem we have is that the various BSD versions were never
really supported by VistaSource, and they didn't sell them
themselves. Those came from Walnut Creek CDROM and later BSDI, and
seem to have fallen by the wayside. I suspect that if someone who is
doing a BSD distribution stepped up and asked, they could get us a new
version. But it's going to take action from the BSD side of things to
make it happen.

I'm probably going to switch to OpenOffice when I switch my desktop to
5-STABLE, unless a new BSD version becomes available.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.