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.

Comments

Sad - but the source lives on

[ghazban]

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.

Get gobeProductive Demo here

[snarfer]

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

Re:But they did sell it

[Inoshiro]

"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.