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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.

4 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. 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.)

  4. 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.