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

Office Shakedown

[peatbakke]

Hey, this is great stuff. A couple years ago, people were saying that Linux didn't stand a chance in business computing unless a good office productivity suite was available ... and now we have several in the pipeline, a couple of which are actually quite reasonable. Give 'em another year or two, and I think we'll have some solid cross platform products.

So, I'm curious: Releasing GP under an open source license is certainly The Right Thing To Do, but what specific benefits might we get from it? Are office suites as layered as operating systems, with code on higher levels fairly portable, or are the only standards at the file format level?

Also, is it a "from scratch" rewrite of ClarisWorks, or might there be some sticky licensing issues with Apple popping up in the near future .. ?

Regardless, having different ways of doing the same things, so long as there's open and stable file formats, is always a good thing ...

Re:GOBE is a StarOffice world

[ReconRich]

In a way, it's a little sad that open source fans can't all get behind one specific office suite.
This attitude, that "There can be only one" is a sure fire recipe for making Open Source software suck as badly as closed source software. The competition between KDE and Gnome has been nothing but good for both sides. M$ succeeded in the first place by the desire that many people had 10 years ago for 1 OS, 1 Word Processor and so on. Well, we have it now, and only people with an MCSE like it.
The desire for a single Office Suite, Desktop System, etc. comes from the desire to "Beat Microsoft". We have one strength over M$ - They are a marketing machine, not a technology machine. If we try to beat them at their own game, we will lose. If we play our own game - Free software competing with ITSELF, then we will win. And we won't get stuck with software that was developed for its marketing value. The idea that we ought to all work together is rubbish; for all its ugliness the KDE vs. Gnome war made both sides better. And they will continue to get better because of the competition. The same chance exists with Office Suites. Don't tell me we ought to "work together" ; tell me why "yours" is great, and mine "sucks". "Mine" will be better for it. And so will "yours"

-- Recon