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Gobe Productive To Be GPLed
ParisTG writes "The Gobe Productive office suite is to be re-licensed under the GPL, according to an interview by OSNews. "FreeRadical has purchased the gobeProductive source code and plans to continue to develop the product under a GPL license."" The people who wrote Gobe, are also the folks who wrote ClarisWorks ? , if you remember back to that. I've used Gobe a few times before - great office suite.
That's exactly what BeOS needs now ;)
...and I still hear people calling for the open sourcing of WordPerfect. How many office suites do we need?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It's very noble of Gobe to release the source after the product's financial demise, rather than sell it on for a pittance. Hopefully the clean and bloat-free source will live on.
See osnews for a comment by one of Gobe's developers Tom Hoke.
ah we don't need another Claris Works..
and the mascot dogcow is dead!
Long Live Open Office!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I'm rolling out 30 P166s and this will be on it :)
Relly nice program! I just tested it on Windows and now i wonder why anyone would want MS office. Especially the graphics module is impressive, and I can't believe how fast this app is, yet has tons of features. It really make MS office look old, even XP. This is one of these nice suprises :-)
Gobe can be found here and the features they have in their product can be found here. That particular product is Windows-only but version 2.0 is BeOS as well.
Bruce Hammond: We are planing to rename it somehow. I would love to get feedback from the community as to what the name should be
:) and for business users, call it PCD Productivity Suite.
gobeProductive...an obvious anagram is: Pivot Core Debug
Applixware, imho, has a certain polish and ease-of-use to it that none of the free programs has ever matched.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
In a way, it's a little sad that open source fans can't all get behind one specific office suite. I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office. There are many people doing just this, and there is finally a little bit of buzz in the non-techie world about StarOffice.
Gobe office will complicate this, because in many ways, it's as good as StarOffice (better at some things, worse at others). Techies who advocate a GPL office suite will no longer speak with a single voice, and managers who are contemplating a MS-software purge in their offices get scared because now they must undergo the agony of deciding which suite to train their staff on. This might make them more likely just to say "aw, forget it" and fork up the MS licensing fees. I mean, there will be flames all over the internet to the effect that "Now that GOBE is free, there is no point in maintaining OpenOffice anymore" and others that say "GOBE will die an ungraceful death because OpenOffice is just too far ahead." Managers will freak out and start worrying that the horse they pick will die mid-race, and then they'll have to retrain their staff again. Well, anyway, it's a thing to watch out for.
Having said that, I have a feeling I'll be a GOBE user real soon. I've played with it at a friend's house and I was pretty impressed by the performance.
Sure buddy, Apple discontinued it. You keep saying that.
Make perfect sense for more people to start looking at Linux as a desktop alternative (*gasp*). The recent news that we can't buy computers without an OS (welcome to the United States of Amerikka), leads me to belive that MS is starting to get scared.
Recent reviews of Gobe have shown it to be a good office suite, and one that understands native MS binary formats. I hope that the OS community can continue development and make it a real competitive force unlike mozilla. IMHO the non GPL browser OPERA is a much better product than the open source Mozilla, and I have no quams with paying for good software. I'd just like to see more world class software open source.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
n/t
Copyright © 1994-2002, FileMaker, Inc. All rights reserved.FileMaker, Inc. is a subsidiary of Apple Computer, Inc.
My god, you're really misinformed, aren't you? I think overrated would be a better way for your post to have been modded...
One common complaint about free software development is the waste of effort reproducing functionality with different, distinct projects that rarely share code. Text editors, desktop environments, browsers, window managers....there are tons of each, ostensibly to fit individual's needs. Unfortunately, it seems to me that only a handful, probably two, actually end up with the majority of users in each category. Either vim or Emacs. GNOME or KDE. Konqueror or Mozilla. Windows managers...well there are more, but there are certainly a ton of window managers that got (half-)developed that hardly anyone uses. Why we didn't stop with twm, I'll never understand! ;^)
Now, we have OpenOffice, GNOME Office, KOffice, and eventually this project it seems. At least two of these, OpenOffice and the new Gobe guy, have some commercial push behind them. Not all of these can possibly pull in the full benefit that the GPL (or other free licenses...I seem to recall that OO might be a mixed license) would normally grant them as they try to draw from the community. That pool of potential eyeballs all checking source and potential fingers typing in patches and extra functionality...it's all going to be split up.
Heck, just look at the Mozilla project. It's been my impression that most code is getting done by the paid professionals and that Mozilla draws on the community primarily for bug testing and evangelism.
Anyway, this is all to say that two years ago I might have cheered a company with commercial backing buying up the source to a decent office suite and releasing it. (In fact, I was happy to have Sun take over StarOffice, and moreso when they freed the source.) But now this Free Radical could be just one more company that goes down the tubes basing their product on a GPLed source code. They can blame the community for not helping out and the cheap-ass users for not paying for the product that could be had for free. Other than that negative press, the net result will have been that resources (users, coding, testing, time) would have been diluted, being split up among this and the other projects, and those projects that did survive would be less well-developed as a result. Cooperation is needed to guarantee that GPL source that lives forever is actually useful source that lives forever. Modules that can be picked up and shared, like one that imports and exports MS DOC format files.
Not that it'll do any good for me to be a nattering naybob of negativity on this subject. Someone probably just filed a new window manager on freshmeat as I was typing this.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
And when will this rumour die -- Microsoft's money was for nonvoting shares, was a trivial amount of Apple's net worth, and was primarily part of a deal to settle patent infringement suits.
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Hey, this is great stuff. A couple years ago, people were saying that Linux didn't stand a chance in business computing unless a good office productivity suite was available ... and now we have several in the pipeline, a couple of which are actually quite reasonable. Give 'em another year or two, and I think we'll have some solid cross platform products.
.. ?
...
So, I'm curious: Releasing GP under an open source license is certainly The Right Thing To Do, but what specific benefits might we get from it? Are office suites as layered as operating systems, with code on higher levels fairly portable, or are the only standards at the file format level?
Also, is it a "from scratch" rewrite of ClarisWorks, or might there be some sticky licensing issues with Apple popping up in the near future
Regardless, having different ways of doing the same things, so long as there's open and stable file formats, is always a good thing
After installing BEOS on my old quad cpu mac, I installed the no longer available version 2 of GOBE Productive on my machine see here for a snapshot here . This inspired me so much that I purchased the windows version and run it on windows 2000. I can honestly say that I no longer need any MS suite at home now, and that is a great thing. The ability to save as a PDF is a real bonus as well. The flexability of the "family license" (can install on all your home machines) is a real bonus to those of us that have many machines at home.
...and buy Microsoft Windows source code! I bet the GNU project can handle that.
:)
No wait, they said it's too dangerous for national security to publish it. Whops.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
That you'd think FileMaker Pro is superior to Access? Having done substantial programming in both (shudder), I can firmly and authorititatively say that FileMaker Pro really sucks a fat donkey dong. Klugy scripting, absolutely absurd method of relating data, etc. Utter crap.
Of course, nothing holds a candle to FoxPro 2.6 for DOS/SCO Unix. The absolute pinacle of desktop database development.
Note necessarily. If I remember correctly, Gobe Office is based on GNOME's libs, so there's potential for GNOME office to be merged with a GPLed Gobe Office.
The incentive for the Gobe Office people is that they'll get free advertisement from being included in the GNOME distribution, like GNUcash, and they'd get extra voluteer help.
The incentive for the Abiword people is that they'd get more functionality and a pure Gtk+ port so they could achieve their long term vision today. They'd lose one or two platforms, but the effort it would take to port Abiword to GNOME 2 could be redirected to porting Gobe Office to the missing platforms.
Gnumeric wouldn't gain much other than better integration with other office apps, but this might be enough.
The other GNOME office apps would gain immensely.
Although this is correct for the Apple version, this is certainly not true for the Windows version. And since I referenced MS in the body of my comment, I assumed that you could connect the dots.
Sorry for any confusion.
Man, people are really hostile around here. You all have a bad weekend?
Of course, nothing holds a candle to FoxPro 2.6 for DOS/SCO Unix
Er, uh, what about dBase?!?!
One of the TechNotes contained this;
Besides, as reported on AtAT recently, Clarus is very much alive and appears in MacOS X 10.2 - aka 'Jaguar'*moof!* :)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Would be nice, but not gonna happen. There is a lot of code in the BeOS codebase that Be licenced from third parties- they cannot release that code to the public.
id Software's Doom and SciTech's Watcom C++ had the same problem of proprietary code licensed from third parties, but id solved the problem by releasing a crippled version (without sound) and Sybase plans to solve it by rewriting the third-party parts before releasing the code, but that's still taking a long time.
Will I retire or break 10K?
when will we have ONE open source office packages which we all can use? Like now there's a number of Office packages which are doing the same thing and ofcourse, inventing the wheel once again, in each different office package.
I want to announce that International Physics Olympias 2002 sucks. Since IPhO 2002 was held in Indonesia, therefore I announce that Indonesia sucks.
The test is so easy that Indonesia and Azerbajin earn 3 gold medals each. Bear in mind that Indonesia only earn 1 gold medals in IPhO 1995-2001. It is impossible for them to earn 3 gold medals unless the test use crappy high school physics problems. It is a joke that you get high school physics problem in such a prestigious high level contest with the potential of creating a future Nobel winner. And what the fuck about Azerbajin getting 3 gold medals, Have you heard of this country before?
For your information, Russia also have 3 gold medals in IPhO 2002. Do you think Russian are stupid people who don't know physics? Can you imagine Indonesia having such an amazing improvement just in 1 year from 0 gold medals in 1999,2000,2001 to 3 gold medals in 2002? Can you imagine Indonesia getting the same number of gold medal as Russia? The Indonesian has brough shame to the world physics education and science community.
I write this article because I hope Indonesian will be criticized around the world for bringing shame to the world physics education. I hope they learn from their mistake and don't repeat it in the future.
The potential scenario described would indeed be unfortunate, and could hurt the spread of open source. Perhaps the impact could be reduced if the applications were capable of supporting at least one shared file format - so at least if you do pick a product that dies on the vine later on, at least your documents are still useful and your only problem is your training overheads...
Unfortunately, Apple only pre-loads AppleWorks on their "consumer" Macs (iMac, eMac, and iBook), and not any of their Pro line (PowerMac G4 and PowerBook). AppleWorks would be a lot nicer if it was installed by default on every Mac - but then again that would hurt Microsoft's ability to sell Office.
Then again, that might not be such a bad thing, the way their relationship seems to be heading right now. Office is a nice package on the Mac, actually, but MS could use a good kick in the pants to inspire them to cut prices to the point where Apple users are more willing to buy it.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
from the get-yer-spell-check-on dept.
Oh, the sad irony of a Slashdot "editor" saying such a thing!
rooooar
Seems like Gobe is also porting their Be API too, which would give a good API to develop for both BeOS and GNU/Linux (who cares for Windows!).
Can't wait for that!
Gopalarathnam V. Registered GNU/Linux User #218746 http://counter.li.org Please avoid sending me Word or Powerpoint
Some of the free word processing programs including Kword have their own Automation-like interface, but not using COM. Those allow scripting under Linux using CORBA or DCOP or whatever, but probably doesn't help your vertical app under Windows.
Based on my own goals of using a computer with 100% free software, I don't see much point in precisely emulating Word's Automation interface, since I don't want to run Windows or anyone's proprietary COM-dependent app. However, if the app simply launches Word and handles a few simple operations, it might be possible to put some COM wrapper around KWord that turns the COM calls into appropriate DCOP calls. If you really want something like that, I know people who might be able to do it for you, though not for free. However, if you only need a minimal interface to support your vertical app, it might be pretty simple to implement. It would certainly cost more than a single copy of Word, but might be worth it if you want to run it on 10's or 100's of machines.
The ability to automate Office applications is a good thing. It allows you to use the functionality of Microsoft Office without having to re-write it yourself. If, for example, you need Excel to perform a set of complex calculations based on input from a web form, then save the results and email them to the client, you can do that easily with Office, with a very small amount of work. As opposed to writing your own custom calculation engine from scratch. This is the beauty of COM, which a dinasour such as yourself wouldn't understand.
most of these sad jerks have had a pretty shitty life too. They take out their frustration on other people anonymously on the web because they're to scared to kick a dog. Seriously though, Slashdot is made up of a bunch of fucking losers. ArsTechnica.com instead, the OpenForum is much less Gay.
"If you can't sell it, give it away."
One of the few rationalisations that makes sense for Open Source.
Ites says: welcome choice and competition.
Aim not at Microsoft but at the users. Fast, cheap, robust, portable. This should be the goal of all software developers.
Lastly, patience. Good things come slowly.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Mozilla is licensed sort of similarly (the MPL gives Netscape special rights to the code) and it's not attracting so many volunteers either. I'm not real surprised. While the letter of the GPL doesn't prevent dual licensing, it's not really in the GPL spirit, which is that the original author of a piece of code doesn't have special rights that others don't have.
If I add features to an FSF GPL'd program, I'm doing volunteer work for the free software community and it makes me happy. If I add features to a BSD-licensed program, I become an unpaid employee of anyone who feels like forking the code--I don't find that so attractive. If I add features to Gobe Office, I possibly become an unpaid employee of just one company, Free Radical. Once again, life's too short for that.
I'm not a total free software zealot and I am willing to work on proprietary code. But when I do that, I expect to get paid, just as the vendor expects to get paid. So I'm not terribly impressed by these commercial dual licensed semi-GPL projects.
(Man, topic drift inside a single post! Forgive me.)
The Linux version is said to be pre-alpha quality at this stage. Here is screenshots of the spreadsheet and word processor. Although it looks quite a bit nicer than StarOffice, it also seems to be using custom widgets, which I think is a pity. Unless it is some weird gtk theme.
I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
The only problem with this idea is that StarOffice-- as anybody who has actually tried to use it in a business setting knows-- isn't "just as good as" or "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
Evangelizing about StarOffice-- or any of the open source office software products-- right now would do serious damage to the reputation of open source software. When serious business users look at an open source office suite, they're not going to say, "This software, while unfinished, has a lot of potential. I'm excited and intrigued!" Instead, they're going to say, "Those open source nuts clearly don't get it. I've tried their software, and found it wanting. I will ignore them from now on and stick with what works: good old Office XP."
Evangelizing a new product or technology too early can result in its failure rather than its adoption.
Arstechnica did a review of it a while back http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q2/gobe/gobe-1.ht ml
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Step 1: *insert obligatory and unfunny step 3 profit joke*
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
With GOBE being released under the GPL, there is now a choice between Open Source office suites, but how big of a choice is it, really. Open Office is not only further along in development, but has created a solid foundation from which to develop (Project Coders, bug reporting, Sun backing, etc.) GOBE would still have to develop this logistical foundation before it could progress, and by the time that happened, OO would be miles beyond it. Still, there are things that GOBE does better than OO. The best thing to do would be to incorporate some of GOBE's great code into OO, making one office suite that blows away what either would be able to do on their own.
In a way, it's a little sad that open source fans can't all get behind one specific office suite.
This attitude, that "There can be only one" is a sure fire recipe for making Open Source software suck as badly as closed source software. The competition between KDE and Gnome has been nothing but good for both sides. M$ succeeded in the first place by the desire that many people had 10 years ago for 1 OS, 1 Word Processor and so on. Well, we have it now, and only people with an MCSE like it.
The desire for a single Office Suite, Desktop System, etc. comes from the desire to "Beat Microsoft". We have one strength over M$ - They are a marketing machine, not a technology machine. If we try to beat them at their own game, we will lose. If we play our own game - Free software competing with ITSELF, then we will win. And we won't get stuck with software that was developed for its marketing value. The idea that we ought to all work together is rubbish; for all its ugliness the KDE vs. Gnome war made both sides better. And they will continue to get better because of the competition. The same chance exists with Office Suites. Don't tell me we ought to "work together" ; tell me why "yours" is great, and mine "sucks". "Mine" will be better for it. And so will "yours"
-- Recon
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
A very salient point. I've been using OpenOffice on Windows and Linux since pre-1.0, and quite frankly it's not ready for primetime business use (tinkering, sure...where the hell do you think I'm writing this from?). There are some graphics bugs in their Excel-clone that, to me, would be show-stoppers if implemented in our busy office (column headers and recently-changed data simply disappear).
I think we should throw our support behind these open-source Office suites, but squarely behind the development. The deployment can wait, at least until I don't have to worry about getting fired for implementing software that hasn't been solidly debugged.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
You can get the 14-day demo of gobeProductive here. (Windows version.)
You're still wrong. Please, just give up.
Parent post is overrated.
Take a look at the linux version of gobe productive, it integrates really well with gnome - in fact i'd go as far as saying it's more gnome office than gnome office itself. I wonder how the gnome community will react?
it's gtk1.2 - with freetype for anti-aliasing (and they use gnome-print for printing)
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Its good the office application is more resource friendly, but a shame I have to waste even more resources installing gnome to use it.
Personally, I would stick with icewm and lyx.
I have written a few hokey papers and I ended up writeing them in vi/emacs then doing the formating on a mac in Quark
lets face it in terms of layout all these editors suck
if you just want to write something then emacs/vi get you there the main problem is makeing something that people who are used to MS word want to use
Open Office does a good job but it needs its Visaul Component Libs (VCL) sorted
this is what you have to hack in order to get native widgets like the aqua interface they had to hack the VCL for aqua so that the widgets would look right rather than just useing a Xlib solution
(that was what all the open Office on MacOS X was all about currently they just use the Xlib interface)
open office needs to convert VCL to aqua and GTK 2 as well as MFC to look right and appeal to the mass's
regards
John Jones
Any enthusiasm I've heard for Star/Open Office is strictly related to two things--the code is open, and it works. I haven't looked at the code, but I highly doubt that this old German code is any fun to hack on.
People who have used Gobe seem to actively like it, and one would suspect that the code is cleaner and more interesting, too. Hopefully this will increase the overall number of free software hackers working on office suites.
Sun has made a commitment to market Star to the enterprise. Star/OpenOffice can handle that for a while, but Gobe will probably become more fun and useful at least for individuals.
Right now there are some people developing an open source version of BeOS, under de BSD license, and trying to bring it back to life (support new hardware, etc). GPLing the office suite of BeOS will be of great help for those guys of Openbeos.org.
But you have to strike a balance between zillions of office suites and one. If you have zillions, then all the developers are spread out so thin that no work gets done on any of them. (That's where we might be headed with Star Office, Abi Word, K Office, now Gobe...) ... what's really the difference between Word 97, 2000 and XP?)
If you have just one, then there's no competition and thus no incentive for progress on that one. (See MS Office recently
But what's the optimum number of projects so that we get ample competition with ample development on each one?
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Gobe = desert, thus call it DUNE. Sounds good, easy to remember.
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One thing to remember is that apple is still hurting from their lessons they learned in the 80s..
One of those lessons was that ALL the early macs, for YEARS, were bundled with MacWrite. They did this to be nice ("Hey! This is a machine for the masses! I'll be they'd like it if we gave them a free word processor!"), but a result of this was that for YEARS, except for MS, no one would release a word processor for the mac. Why not? Because everyone already had MacWrite, so why would they buy another word processor?!
I've had those who were there describe to me the point at which MacWrite was no longer bundled with all macs as a point at which the mac software market started opening up more.
Anyway, this is just apple's way of avoiding the situation; they market the iMac as "everything you'll ever need in one box", so of course they have to provide everything in one box including a web processor, but they can still encourage developers to make word processors for the pro models-- the ones you are more likely to see used in the business environment.
Of course, so far there aren't any word processors for Mac OS X i'm aware of except Appleworks and MSoffice, so it's a bit of an unsuccess there, but the OS is still young..
--super ugly ultraman
People always tells me there "a number of office suites that run under Linux".
So I know there's openoffice, there's siag office, and some not-so-complete suites like "gnome office", or single-application thingies such as abiword.
So, exactly how many of the "complete suites" out there that runs under Linux ?
And if anyone is reading this so far, what's the other "office-related" applications that you know of, that may be not as famous as abiword or gnumerics, but still worth to be mentioned ?
Thanks for any and all your inputs.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Exactly, there are already four official credible gpl'd office projects now:
- open office
- k office
- gnome office
- gobe
2 is ok, 3 is on the limit. But 4 is spreading the developer resources too thin. One of the offices is not going to make it, that's obvious.
I wrote a review of Productive 3 for my Web site a while back... Check it out at msboycott.com/thealt/reviews/gobeproductive.shtml.
This is great news for everyone because gobeProductive is slim and trim - it is to office suites what Opera is to Web browsers.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
How so? I'm working with a small company right now that's already committed to switching all new computer users to Star Office. They are open to desktop Linux on some desktops as well. This is a technical company, and the CEO (PhD. physicist) was quite impressed when he imported a Word document and all the formulas came through flawlessly.
They figure they'll have one workstation with Office for document export, when HTML or PDF isn't sufficient.
Microsoft pricing has finally gotten far enough out of sync with small business budgets, that I think you'll see quite a few switching. Sun made a smart move charging a nominal price, now businesses are starting to see Star Office as a serious product.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
> I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via
> mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
I'd rather win the war not the battle. Why should office managers be making these choices at all? If the software is free and the file formats work together why not pair the program with the employee's personality and preferences. Gobe allows the unskilled but highly expressive employee to create, Hamilton allows the employee who uses mobile devices to work the same way on his PDA and his desktop, OpenOffice trying to act like MS office is good for the employee who hates change...
Oh and BTW StarOffice is commercial software. Open office is free software.
The only problem with that argument is that it's baseless. We have don't know what would have happened if KDE and Gnome worked as one instead of just competing against each other. We don't have access to an alternate parellel universe, or a time machine to go make a comparision...
--
Simon
I'm not sure I see these products as being easy to rank in a better or worse fashion. Nor do I think much code sharing is likely. Gobe focuses on integration and ease of use. Open Office features on similarity of Office and features. Their look and feel are totally different.
Its kind of like vi and emacs. While its fun to talk about which is better in reality they are just too different to be compared.
danheskett wrote: "Glad other software worked for you, but lots of times, a critical feature is missing from an OSS package, and attitude is that 'you don't really need that anyways.'"
:)), how likely do you think that your suggestion would even make it to a developer with the power to make the right change? My complaint letters to Adobe and Microsoft about various bugs / misfeatures over the last several years have gone either unanswered or yielded only bland, canned responses.
:)
This is a valid point (that developers sometimes / often don't listen to users), but not confined to open-source software. I've made feature suggestions, web-page corrections of fact or phrasing, and minor bug reports to Free software developers, and most of them resulted in quick results (or at least responses) from the developers. If you wanted a new feature in Microsoft Word (what new feature would fit?
(Also, in many cases, the "you don't need that anyhow" is followed by "... unless you want to pay big bucks for another product higher up our product line." Or even small bucks, like QuickTime Pro.)
It's nice that Free software programmers tend to be more accessable, less bound by corporate rule-mongering than employees at NDA-loaded, market-driven, lawyer-heavy companies are.
Even if they use their time / money / life energies somewhat differently, the *programmers* themselves might be happy to make changes in both cases, but Free programmers seem better able to effect them. That's been my experience, anyhow
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Isn't that kind of the benefit of open source software? As a developer everything is available, and if I don't like how someone else has done something I can do it myself, I mean its open, right? Your talking about these developers as if they are simply a misdirected resource, and that might be the wrong way to look at something like this.
But now this Free Radical could be just one more company that goes down the tubes basing their product on a GPLed source code.
I don't know about Free Radical's business model, but if it goes down I wouldn't just to blame the software license.
People who complain about too many choices with Linux are a bit perplexing to me, I mean there are other choices out there, even if you don't like Windows, there is still OS X..(I am really not trying to be condescending)
Quack, quack.
Nothing is better.
We also need an open format for editable drawings. Flash, maybe?
The first time Bill Gates tried a web browser, his memo noted "I was was on for three hours and didn't see a single Microsoft file format." He's fixed that "problem". The open source community hasn't pushed back hard enough on that issue.
I wonder if this will change as people become more tech savy and UI design becomes more standardized. The layout of menus in productivity suites (office suite) is already pretty standard in the features. One thing that works against other office suites is the old marketing story about brand loyalty. I'm sure others have heard this statistic. Whether it's true or not is beyond me, but if "3/4 of the people stick to one brand after college" the only change office suites have of beating MS is to reach the youth of the world.
I am using OpenOffice for business use and have had no problems what so ever. I could agree that it's a bit
slow to start on Linux, but I start it automagically as I log in, so that isn't much of a problem.
So far I have had no problems communicating with our business partners or people in the company that still uses word.
And back when it was in beta I used it to open word documents that couldn't be opened in MS-Word due to MS-Office version incompatibilities.
So perhaps you could tell us a bit more on why you think It's still not ready for business. What am I missing?
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
hey kiddy please stop with the m$ troll remarks. that $ is obnoxious. I hate ms as much as you but I fight it with real, constructive comments isntead of name calling.
I would like to believe that the strength of the open software movement is not such a limited resource that development can only occur on one or the other.
:) each have their strengths - with easy interchange of data this is a reason to consider leaving MS Office. I don't believe that in general people say "Oh! I have too many good choices - it's so confusing - I better spend more money and not think about it."
As a Gobe employee I've been convinced for sometime that Open Office was not a competitor but an ally - the only thing missing to really prove this is a migration to XML for a common file format.
As noted GP and OO (and others
I think an entire tribe of 200-500 lb Gorillas has a better chance at long term success than a single 800 lb Gorilla.
Now, of course, I'm not really a big fan of "office suites" when it comes to word processing and the like (go LaTeX!!), but it's great to see more and more companies using GPL'ed code as a tool against M$ monopoly oppression. Overall, OpenOffice has been very disappointing thus far. It's buggy, it's slow, it's bloated, it uses its own widget library, and the code is spaghetti at it's best. Maybe the OpenOffice team will 'pull a mozilla' a couple years from now, but that seems a ways off. Parts of the 'Gnome Office' collection are great tools, but are also rather disjointed and have terribly buggy import/export filters it seems. KOffice 1.2 is slick, efficient, and very promising, but needs more developers. (it's my long term bet, actually) Now along comes (formerly-Gobe) Productive. By the looks of it, Productive won't become a 'competitor' to the other open projects for some time, but at least we'll have more code base to draw on. Perhaps it should be merged with the now-fragmented Gnome Office (and get rid of the uselessly anorexic AbiWord that doesn't even support tables). Perhaps the code contains some insight on making better import filters for M$ office formats. Perhaps we can agree on a standard XML format for vector graphics too. And of course, that's the biggest issue in all of this -- standardization. We need ONE file format that all Open Source office tools can use seemlessly.. a format that is feature-extensible, straight-forward, and consistant. And we need to agree on a single name for this format so that it can become recognized and comfortable, just as most non-clued business people now say "send me a Word document" or the like.
I wish they would put it out under the free BSD license that was instrumental in creating free software as we know it today, including linux, though linux does not give enough credit to the free software predecessor that went before it and are still better than it today.
I know, I'll rewrite Minix and add a SYSV system call layer, TCP/IP networking, NFS, and a new VM system. Oh wait, BSD and linux already have these? Who cares? That didn't stop linux from rewriting what was already in BSD and wasting years of human effort and setting back the state of computing by 10 years. So, I'm starting my free UNIX clone today. Who wants to join me and rewrite everything all over again?
In the past, I have done such things as open a PDF file with Xpdf, then 'print' it to a Postscript file, go in and manually edit the Postscript file with a text editor, then import it back into a PDF file.
I have used such methods to remove diagonal text strips placed on each page in PDF documents, and other things of this sort.
I've also been able to use Xpdf in this fashion (print the PDF to a postscript document) to turn vector-art images saved to PDF into editable/resizable images. I imported the Postscript images into Micrografx Designer and had back editable, resizable vector graphics to tweak as I desired. Designer (Windows only, of course) is available really cheap these days if you buy the "Micrografx Graphics Suite" package for about $50.
Ok you little wankers, and amiga brained 4 bit amitures. When are you going to stop reading alt.binaries.pictures.*.* | grep *. natalie + portman + nude, and push for a mans OS to be GPL : BE, the only os worth a shit. it runs fast is sometimes about as fun to look at as a 1 bit monitor, and almost no support, yet if it doesn't die it would be: the ONLY worth wile 64 bit os: speed, and all your processors would be used VERY efeciantly no need to have 600terabits for your porn when 1 gig will hold the young shaved teen sluts you'll never get, it's sound kicks ass and guess what: once it's configured no need to fidget with it(Linux on the other hand breaks all the fucking time). See you down in hell fudgepackers from minosota.
Software should become freeware or open source after the patent expires.
I wonder what life would be like if intellectual property was free from the start.
Before they get themselves deservedly turned into glass...
It depends on what your needs are. Test it thoroughly with what you actually do. Don't expect that features that you haven't checked will work in the current release. (Many will, but there are some that don't, and some that "sort of work".)
I would recommend running a few systems in duplicate for a week or so before beginning a real switch. It's a real nuisance, but often if you catch a bug at that point you can either fix it or work around it, but after deployment it would just be a killer, and leave everyone with a really bad taste in their mouth. (First impressions are very important. People who know that they are testers are willing to be a bit more forgiving than those who expect that this is the for-real version.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This isn't clear. The number of Linux users has been increasing rapidly, and many of them are programmers. The acutal teams of developers are pretty small, we may talk about thousands of developers, but that's not actual practice. There may be thousands of debuggers, and people who make suggestions, but not too many developers.
The truth is, we don't know what the right number of project is. We only know that it's larger than one. Two is a definite improvement. If the projects can swap code with each other, then I suspect that the idea number is over ten. Unfortunately, what I have heard about the Gobe license implies that the Gobe code won't be freely swappable (I heard that Free Radical has special rights above and beyond the GPL permitted), so probably the Gobe project won't be able to accept code from the other projects. This limits their viability, but as they are one of the first four, perhaps not fatally. When you want to diversify in a crowded area, you specialize. Somebody will come up with a word processor that's like one of the other project, except that it specializes in being a Mozilla plug-in. And it uses Mozilla to do the page layout and printing. (You can sort of do that with anything that generates html, but I bet there's a better way.) And since it's "parasitic" on Mozilla, it can quickly port to any platform that runs mozilla. (Mozilla handles all the system specific stuff.)
OK. That's one word processor specialty that no one's addressed yet. I bet you there are other reasonable ideas just waiting to be developed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
if it took 4 posts to explain that the API is actually XML, you honestly think a whole team of developers trained to run in 'microsoft shops' can actually understand it in less than say .. a year ? ... Don't be stupid. You obviously haven't seen vb in action. (or are still plain too immature to understand it).
It is great that Open Source proponents write much Free Software, but it is wrong to credit the Open Source movement with the GNU GPL. The GPL is the work of the Free Software movement. The Open Source movement defines their terms so as to allow listing the GPL as an approved license. This is not authorship and it is unfair to mention that movement in this context.
Your claim associates the achievements and values of the Free Software movement with another philosophy which began over a decade after the GPL was written. The Free Software movement centers on greater societal software rights and the GPL grew from that freedom-minded perspective. Please give credit to the proper movement when talking about the GNU GPL.
Digital Citizen
GobeProductive's code is rewrite FROM SCRATCH. It was coded from scratch for BeOS.
It shares NO CODE with ClarisWorks. In fact, it is better than AppleWorks, because the guys rewrote the thing from scratch with all this knowledge that came from ClarisWorks.
I agree that an automation interface is important. AbiWord doesn't currently have anything, but automation is planned. They will expose stuff via CORBA, which should be great in a GNOME environment.
They also will do something with scripting. I'm not sure what, because I haven't found a recent discussion of that; if you do a google search, you will find dozens of messages two years old or older, from flame wars on what is the best way to do scripting. (Some guys want Perl, some guys want Python, some guys want a free clone of Visual Basic, and no doubt there are LISP fanatics out there who want SCHEME. And so on.)
You must admit that automation isn't a requirement for the vast majority of word processor users; it made sense for the AbiWord developers to focus on core features, and add automation later. I assume that since they knew they would be automating later, they didn't make any stupid designs that will be hard to automate. At least I hope so.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I started using (okay, pirated) Productive for BeOS with versions 1.0 and 1.5, and I bought version 2.0. It is an absolutely wonderful piece of software, and could actually replace MS Office entirely for most people. StarOffice, on the other hand, I found to be very clunky and nowhere near as good as what it was trying to be. Gobe Productive is the sort of thing that I would give to my mother to replace MS Office for her. The only feature that I ever missed from it was equation editing, which of course could now be added. Overall though, for those of you who haven't tried it, the inline sub-document capabilities (through document frames) are simply amazing and very intuitive. I haven't seen anything comparable to it in other software.
Huh? How do you figure this?
I don't see that happenning.
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I don't think of having two alternatives in GNOME and KDE as having a "choice" but rather as a fork in the operating system platform.
As for me, I've made a few small bugfixes to Apache and sent them in, since I'd done them already anyway. I wrote a larger extension for Apache because someone hired me to do it, but I wouldn't have done it for free. If Apache was GPL'd, I might have done it for free.
I hardly consider either gnome or kde to be an operating system.
I have both on my system, and apps for both work great under both desktops. That is what they are, desktop environments, not operating systems.
I'm using Window Maker right now, and I have Sylpheed with GTK extensions running, along with a couple of KDE specific apps. If it was a fork of the operating system, I wouldn't be able to do this.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
One client of mine, a regional finance company who has moved over 100 users at their headquarters to OpenOffice/SO6 in the last three months, would beg to differ.
This is step one in their transition to Linux on the desktop. They initially trialed SO52 and met with a lot of user resistance due to the BDD (Big Dump Desktop) but OO1 and SO6 have pleased their users (and their CFO) very much. I post this anonymously because they would prefer to make the announcement themselves when the process is complete.
Gobe is a lot nicer and more efficient than SO/OO (based on my eval of the Windows version) but it probably came along a little too late for them. There are a lot more early adopters left for Gobe though.