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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.

7 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. GOBE is a StarOffice world by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I should first issue a disclaimer that I haven't tried to hack around with the StarOffice code, nor have I looked at Gobe code. However, just from the mere size and responsiveness of Gobe, I have the impression that it must be a fairly clean bunch of code. It does a lot without being bloated, and it might not turn out to be terribly hard to get it to do more.

    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.

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Re:You can find trial ver on download.com by Freedom+Bug · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  4. But they did sell it by phr2 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    According to the article, Free Radical paid for the code and then GPL'd it. It doesn't say how much they paid so I don't know whether it was a pittance. The GPL'ing does not appear to have been done as an act of charity. Rather, it looks like they want the Internet to be their unpaid porting, QA, and feature-addition department. The program will be dual licensed which means there will probably be proprietary versions, possibly including contributions from those same unpaid programmers. I'm not terribly thrilled with that kind of arrangement.

    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.)

    1. Re:But they did sell it by HiThere · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I believe that the claim is that because of the licensing, he didn't even consider working on the code.

      I sort of agree with that, though more to the point, that's not the place that I want to put my energy ... I've got a different project in mind. When I do it, it will be GPL. And it may interface with, say, Apache, but it won't be a part of Apache... but then it wouldn't anyway.

      A large part of what goes on is "What itch are you scratching?" Most people would be willing to put up with a license that they didn't totally agree with to work on the project that they wanted. There are limits, but I don't really feel that any of the open source projects go outside of them. BSD tends to be more for people who just want the code to get out there, and GPL more for people who don't want to be required to buy back the code that they wrote ...

      Still, the "part commercial" licenses are special cases. They don't really seem unfair to me, at least not necessarily unfair. The Mozilla-Netscape connection seems to work out alright. Anyone can use it, but only Netscape is allowed to sell it (outside of GPL constraints .. anyone can sell it if they follow GPL rules).

      The thing is, most software projects really are small teams. The folks in charge are the folks in charge, and you may be able to join with them, but it may be years before you become a core member. If then. But this is just human small group dynamics, so it shouldn't be surprising. Of course the Netscape in group remained the major coders on Mozilla. They worked together, they got to know each other. Of course it was hard for outside coders to get in. For one think, they worked on the project full time, and the outside coder who did that was quite rare, but for another, they knew each other. They were "us".

      The Linux kernel group is more open, but that's partly because they are more dispersed. And that has negative as well as positive effects. Still, the core group of coders doesn't change rapidly. Anyone can earn a place, but the criteria aren't any hard and inflexible kind of thing. If the other members don't like you, they won't let you in. If they do, the entrance bar is lower. And this isn't a bad thing. Groups need social cohesion to work well. And this, be it remembered, is with a maximally "FSF approved" license.

      If you wanted to nit pick, I suppose that you could claim that if you were working on the kernel you were laboring on behalf of Red Hat (though other commercial entities would also benefit). Nothing wrong with that. They pick up their fair share of the tab, no reason they shouldn't benefit.

      Back to Netscape, and the work on Mozilla. Netscape picks up most of the tab, not reason they shouldn't benefit. This isn't like MS snaffeling the TCP stack from BSD. MS is just a sponger, but that doesn't describe Netscape. And I doubt that it will describe Free Radical. (If it does, then they've just wasted their money on a bad bet. They're going to need to put a lot more push behind it than just opening the code if they want to get decent development in any reasonable time frame, when KOffice and OpenOffice are looking so good.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  5. Re:GOBE is a StarOffice world by foobar104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:You can find trial ver on download.com by foobar104 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?