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Gobe Productive GPL Release In Danger
Elliot writes "Gobe, developers of Gobe Productive, a fast and lightweight office suite initally developed for the BeOS and later ported to Windows and Linux (which never made it past beta stage), announced in August that they would be open sourcing Gobe Productive under the GPL. Unfortunately, it appears that financial issues might prevent this from happening. A shame to see yet another wonderful piece of software [possibly] fail."
Although this is really off-topic, and it's obviously flame-bait (therefore posted anonymously), I somehow still feel that I need to respond...to help guide anybody who reads this and takes it seriously.
According to this article, the Aberdeen Group has reached the conclusion that Linux is the most unsecure OS on the basis that there are more security advisories in Linux than in the other operating systems.
I can draw a completely different conclusion from the same data. Linux is the most secure OS exactly because there are so many security advisories. With so many people looking at the source code for open-source software, these people will find security issues before they become a problem. The advisories are then sent, and talented people proceed to fix the problem.
The article then goes on to say that the argument that open-source vulnerabilities are fixed quickly "means little" because they need more testing before they're released to customers. The strength of the system is that those customers will do a lot more testing and fixing of bugs themselves than any proprietary distribution could hope for. If a customer is unwilling to test new software, they can always choose older, tried and true versions.
Please remember that security advisories, i.e. finding the security vulnerabilities is a good thing. It's a much worse problem to have those vulnerabilities and only find out about them after they are exploited.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
That free software requires money to fund its production? Almost sounds like Capitalism.... the irony....
Oh, you're a Mac user. That explains a lot. I've never seen a group more willing to bend over and grab their ankles.
How's this for grabbing my ankles? Fuck you, you ignorant son of a whore.
There. Now we're even. On with the show.
WTF happened to Outlook
Nothing. There has never been an Outlook in the Mac version of Office. There's a Mac version of Outlook, available separately and for free, but it only works as an Exchange Server client. I've only ever known one guy who used it and he was kinda... well, let's just say he wasn't the most critically minded soul you could ever hope to meet.
& what's this half-assed Outlook Express wannabe?
Are you talking about Entourage? It's actually a pretty nice piece of kit. Don't use it myself; I'm not big with the "personal information organizer" things these days. But back when I had contacts and appointments and shit to keep up with, it was actually a much nicer tool than Outlook 2000 was on my PC.
Also, you fail to mention ClarisWorks/AppleWorks
I mentioned AppleWorks in another post. The reason I didn't mention it in my comments about olden style word processors is because, if I remember, it didn't exist in those days. I'm talking about circa 1989, and ClarisWorks 1.0 didn't ship until late '91.
Incidentally, ClarisWorks (later AppleWorks) is a predecessor to Gobe Productive only in the sense that Scott Holdaway, Bob Hearn, Tom Hoke, Scott Lindsey and a few others worked on ClarisWorks before leaving to start Gobe. There's no code or IP shared between the ClarisWorks and Productive. So your statement isn't really accurate, you know.
I write in my journal