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Gobe Productive To Be GPLed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-yer-spell-check-on dept.

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.

8 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Sad - but the source lives on by ghazban · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Link and features by PhysicsGenius · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Gogogo! by zapfie · · Score: 2, Informative

    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. Efforts like OpenBeOS are looking good though.

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  4. review by froseph · · Score: 2, Informative

    Arstechnica did a review of it a while back http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q2/gobe/gobe-1.ht ml

  5. Get gobeProductive Demo here by snarfer · · Score: 3, Informative

    You can get the 14-day demo of gobeProductive here. (Windows version.)

  6. gtk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    it's gtk1.2 - with freetype for anti-aliasing (and they use gnome-print for printing)

  7. Re:But they did sell it by Inoshiro · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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 don't think that's because of the licencing so much as it's a factor of a C++ application which has a many hundred meg source tree, uses its own meta-description language for its interface (which is implemented in its own rendering core), has its own cross-platform COM interface for dynamic object meshing, and in general is a very, very, very complex and advanced piece of work.

    It's not exactly something you sit down and build a patch for over lunch. It's more complex than the Linux kernel in many respects. How many people hack on the kernel full time?

    I can take an OS design class that teaches me enough about how kernels should work that I can work on the Linux kernel; Mozilla requires that you know C++ well, code engineering, and also go on to know the project well (its class libraries, inheritance trees, XPCOM, etc, etc). It's more of a fusion of all your CS classes with a healthy helping of learning the project itself.

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  8. Re:But they did sell it by segoave · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    You don't have to sign over your copyright of your contributed portion of code. They may ask you to do so when they add the patch to their development tree, but you are under no obligation to do so under the GPL.