Indeed, Siress did acknowledge the work of volunteer developers in his original interview. "A lot of this development work is taking place in OpenOffice.org," he said. But he also described his "meeting with Apple next week", and characterized the cooperation between the companies on StarOffice for OS X. "My engineers are working with Apple engineers. So, it's not official. You can imagine -- and I'll tell you this -- Apple cannot unfairly support another ISV (independent software developer). They have to be fair. If they all of a sudden say we're going to help Sun in this porting," it could cause problems. He described much of the early work under way between the two companies as relating to the user interface. "We're working with Apple to understand for the first release for OS X, if it's OK to keep the user interface we have today -- and then start re-chroming the interface across the board," Siress said. The Sun executive continued to describe an ongoing effort to work with Apple. "We're about 30 days from having a plan," Siress said. "One of the things we didn't understand (was) all of Quartz (OS X's graphics engine), and the people at Apple didn't understand the infrastructure of StarOffice. That's all coming to a point where my engineering team has a far better understanding of Quartz and Aqua. Apple, who has now been working in the StarOffice source code, has a far better understanding of the code base itself. What I am asking for is a plan, and one with teeth in it." Siress described two development efforts, a version relying on Java instead of the x11 graphics used in OpenOffice, and another with Quartz. "Now they're working on a Quartz implementation, and we're working on a Java implementation," he said. "So there's two efforts in alignment. The Java one will happen much faster. The Quartz one is the one you have long term." The Sun executive also laid out a fairly clear timetable for an "OpenOffice running solid on OS X by the end of this calendar year. It wouldn't be productised yet, because there are things I need to work through with Apple -- the business issues -- first. The productisation with the fonts, installers and all the kind of stuff is going to take a little more time." He indicated some of those business issues revolved around the StarOffice user interface, which is consistent on the Windows, Linux and Solaris versions. Siress also clearly identified the difference between the open-source version of the productivity suite and the one that Sun is developing. "OpenOffice is the core; it's the same thing," he said. "Once OpenOffice is done, for me to productise it is easy. StarOffice is OpenOffice plus third-party non-open-source technology like fonts and things we have to license. Then we do the testing, packaging all the things you do about creating a product, not just a technology." Siress also expressed his wish list for StarOffice, which would turn responsibility of the commercial product over to Apple. "One of my recommendations was to take AppleWorks and merge it with StarOffice," he said. "So you have one productivity suite, and it has file compatibility across the board. Because what we bring to the table is our transcoder for Microsoft Office. What they bring is their knowledge and experience with the beautiful user interface. If we do this together maybe we can call it StarOffice for OS X, and it's exclusively distributed by Apple. That to me is the perfect story." There apparently is a lot of interest at Sun in StarOffice for OS X because of the number of people who either use Apple PowerBook portables or would like to. Siress noted a number of people were forced to use Windows notebooks. For this reason, "There is a synergy between Sun and Apple to get rid of Microsoft" at Sun, Siress said. "The one application that Sun needs to make the Apple laptop the standard at Sun is StarOffice. There's a benefit on both sides. The Apple team is very interested in making the Apple laptop the standard at Sun."
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