As an end user listening to the open source developers talking about how good of an alternative their product is, I should not be putting any money anywhere. The ‘put your money where your mouth is’ statement is one of those things that has to end. But the fact remains that there’s hardly any updates on the Mac porting page for and that their latest official release is chugging behind a year. I could care less about eye candy and an actual aqua port. I’ve only spoken about an X version for OSX. I’ll be more impressed when you put your money where your mouths are. It’s a tremendous amount of work, the pay is low, and the quality of comments oozing out of this group indicates if they just add enough eye candy to it you’ll all be happy. I look forward to the day they succesfully complete the painstaking amount of work it will take to port OOo to Cocoa, so that all the highly qualified whiners at this site will have a chance to review how pretty the icons are. ![]() And not many of the alternatives (like NeoOffice and the likes) are any good on slower or older Mac systems (like my 800MHz ibook). The complaint about the version for the Mac (using X) is very valid in my opinion. Some Photoshop users are elitist towards The Gimp and some BSD user can be elitist with regard to Linux. Microsoft Windows is a costly proprietary platform too, but 1.1.1 is up to date for that platform now, isn’t it? The word ‘elitist’ can be applied to any OS and to any userbase of an application. *NIX based application are easily ported (as is shown by the fink project and opendarwin ports system). The point about the Mac being a ‘costly proprietary elitist platform with small and diminishing market share’ is irrelevant too. ![]() If you want to make joe end user, use your ‘open and free’ product instead of a closed and proprietary alternative, you might also want to listen to the complaints and grievances of the end user (who is hardly ever a programmer). The excuse that we should stop complaining and thank the devs for doing such a bang up job ‘for free’ is a moot point when you want to compete with commercial products out there. If GIMP 2.0 and Abiword (the latter in an aqua version) can be released for the Mac platform at the same time as the rest of the supported architectures, I wonder why can’t do the same.
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