Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
You've got to remember - Opera is at v6 and Mozilla just hit v1 - give it some time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Another example where open source software has a missing feature it doesn't need simply because it's open.
At least for your example, you don't want an automation interface. OpenOffice has an open file format: just write out the files from scratch. It may be slightly more work up front, but you'll save tons in support costs, run way faster, and be generally way cleaner.
Bryan
One that's actually have better usability would
probably be enough. Today we have Open/StarOffice
but unfortunately it doesn't contain all functionality
of the MS product. I'm not talking about minor stuff
like missing word count, that probably could be fixed
by a macro, but things like a missing Outlook
replacement.
If we run OpenOffice on som unixlike platform this
problem is minor as here there are lot of
Calendar/Mail available.
The real problem is that there is much fewer free
calendar/mail replacements on windows. And this
actually makes it harder for a company to switch
to free OS:es like Linux.
Why? In most cases you would like to have one
company wide standard for things like mail,
calendering, e-mail, and office programs like
spread sheets, word processors and presentation
programs. This means that if there is one desktop
in the company that needs to run a specialized
program that so far only is available on windows,
all the desktops will run windows, as that desktop
will use Outlook for mail and calendaring.
Yes, I know that Mozilla is developing a calendar
program. But it's still a long way before it have
the functionality of MS-Outlook.
The convertion to a free desktop will probably need
to start on windows. If we can break the MS-Office
lock in completely. The next step will be a free OS.
But naturally it doesn't hurt if there are many good
desktop alternatives. At least it may send the message
to the windows community that MS-Word isn't a standard
as most of them seam to think.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
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.)
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.
No, he was right the first time. Spending a fortune rewriting components that are already available is an incredibly stupid idea. The only possible motivation for doing something like that would be the precise sort of FUD that you're slinging: "when Microsoft made it too legally difficult to extend their applications..." Please. You can't base a business plan on unfounded speculation about what Microsoft might do, despite their repeated statements that the won't do it, and the fact that there's no sound reason for them to do it.
We all know you hate Microsoft. That doesn't mean this guy's business plan of using COM components to build their application is a bad idea.
Look at it this way: they're out there selling products, while the open source guys are still figuring out how to build the human interfaces for their various word processors. Which one of those approaches is more sound?
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
Yes, develop one if you're convinced that it's needed to establish credibility with the corporate crowd. But, remember, there's no compelling reason for anyone who's happy using Office to switch to a "wannabe" package, especially when it means switching to a new and strange OS, throwing away all those shrink-wrapped programs that someone has paid for, and throwing away the familiarity of Windows.
What's in it for them: Wipe my machine, throw everything away, and start a new and steep learning curve, just to use something that's "free"? No thanks, that costs too much.
Linux, et al, will continue to appeal primarily to (1) people who like Unix, and (2) people who are motivated by ideology, and (3) people who can't/won't buy commercial software, until someone develops and markets software that provides capabilities that are so unique and compelling that it merits absorbing the very real cost of moving from Windows.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"