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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."
At least there is nowadays an alternative to burying the software forever.
--YerSex
Sex - Find It
...because it is under, or not under, any specific license (even our beloved GPL). It's going to fail because Microsoft's "mindshare" is so phenomenal that it would take nothing short of a miracle for ANYONE to impact its 95+% of the Word Processor market.
I don't like that reality either. But, at the moment, it's true. That's why we need to keep pushing the existing suits remaining against MS. Because they DO have a huge monopoly, because they DID get it through illicit means, and because it IS making it virtually impossible for competitors (like the Gobe Productive people) to break into any of the many fields MS dominates.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It seems to me that, going beyond OpenOffice, the notion of an "integrated office suite" itself is broken. Gobe may be a little better than OpenOffice in design (I doubt it's as functional), but somehow that strikes me as just a meaner sabre tooth tiger--a better implementation of an evolutionary dead end. Even Microsoft has seen the light and claims that they will be trying to redefine what an office suite is in the future.
Unless there is some groundbreaking new functionality in Gobe that just can't be added to OpenOffice, the efforts that would go into porting Gobe to Linux and enhancing it would seem to be better spent on tuning, modularizing, and enhancing OpenOffice.
since you believe that you know how to fix the copyright system, I'll ask you a few questions. first, why only seven years? When someone produces a new product and puts in on the market, they should be able to enjoy copyright protection for a period of time long enough to be reasonably profitable, but not for so long that innovation is stagnated. Though seven years is short enough to prevent the latter, it is also so short as to be prohibitive to profit. Second, from what date do you intend to start counting these seven years? If I decided to reuse libraries from a product I wrote back in 1995, would the date be extended? If not, then what motivation would I have to produce a lasting product? A man needs to eat, and good will makes a poor bread. Though I support the rights of the individual, I also respect the rights of businessmen. I feel that corporations enjoy too many rights without the corresponding responsibilities, but I don't believe that the answer is to strip businesses of the right to profit from their innovation.
Pax Digitalia
Bravo. It's important that people realize that Microsoft Office does not-- well, usually doesn't, anyway-- come bundled with new computers. If you want Office, you have to buy a copy. People use Office because they choose to.
Let me say that just one more time. People are not using Office because it's already installed on their new computers. And they're not suffering along with Office because there are no alternatives. People buy and use Office because they choose to.
Until one or another of the various free office products gets to the point where it's at least as good as Office, most people will choose Microsoft's product.
The "it's good enough" mentality will not result in a successful office productivity package.
I write in my journal
Yes, for one the OpenBeOS folks would most likely love to have it. It was the defacto (if there ever was such a thing) Office Suite standard on BeOS.
Help fight continental drift.
And they're not suffering along with Office because there are no alternatives. People buy and use [Microsoft] Office because they choose to.
The single complaint I've heard the most about OpenOffice and friends? That it doesn't support Microsoft Office file formats well enough. The fact is, I have a half-dozen programs on my computer to read Microsoft Word (I don't care to install OpenOffice, as I don't need it); furthermore, I end up unable to read a number of files on the web and occasionally sent to me because they're in PowerPoint.
Is Microsoft Office a good program? Yes. But for a lot of people, the reason they don't use simpler, cheaper, more portable alternatives is because of Office's proprietary file-formats, not because Office is better for them.
I'd agree with your point that a lot of very different office products might cause confusion, but I don't think it's necessarily the only result of having many choices.
For one thing, I think a lot of the confusion is caused by the fact that lots of the packages try to do the same thing, and try to follow the (good) market leader, MS Office, and so confuse people who expect them to behave in the way that MS Office does. If packages could just focus on what makes them distinctive, on their way of doing things, then initially the choices might be confusing, but given the chance the average consumer will settle down with the choice that best fits them.
I also think that different file formats contribute to a lot of frustration and confusion. Were Gobe and OpenOffice and StarOffice and KOffice and AbiWord and all of the Free Software (or potential FS) suites to create a standard, open format and then use it as their default format, they'd be a lot less confusing, and one could switch between them more easily (as I clumsily do at the moment with OO and KO by exporting as (yuck) MS Word documents).
What Gobe could contribute is a nice, clean office suite that focuses on its own design choices. That could be a really good thing, and could force OO and SO to start looking at how dreadfully slow their interfaces are.
Absolutely.. the problem is that a lot of times they should have thought about making the OS faster and safe.
Instead they kept putting in their OS features nobody asked for, increasing CPU speed demand and RAM hunger...
They think in terms of "the Next Product to sell to the customer", instead of trying to make it "really" good.
I don't mean that's just a Microsoft problem.. but since they're a sort of monopoly, people are going to suffer a lot more from Microsoft mistakes than from the mistakes of the rest of IT industry..
This message doesn't need a sig
Simply put: If a Linux Distro Co [LDC] takes the code and GPLs it, every LDC is NOT going to start using it!
The LDC may modify the code all it wants and create an excellent product that worked well in THEIR distro. People would choose that distro because of the default capability of the product.
Redhat defaults OpenOffice.org in their distro-- nontechnical magazines (the kind businessmen read, like Journal of Accountancy) LOVE THIS!
Buying the source and GPLing it could very well be profitable for this reason.
You just have to realize that some of your target audience wants one solution from one partner.
It doesnt matter how good a competing office productivity suite is if it doesnt fully and completely support all of microsoft's proprietary document formats. The document formats are what create the barrier to entry for non-microsoft products in the office productivity area.
or did you think the document formats were rewritten with every release because they were adding a new feature to them?
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
When all of the competitors in a market are OSS*, more product choice does not equal more freedom. That's kinda what the GPL is all about -- one person (or company) can't run off with the source and deprive the OSS community of the best piece of ______ software it ever had. On the contrary -- with the need normally satisfied by inter-product competition is taken resolved in another way, more product choice equals more confusion. Users like to get comfortable with a method for accomplishing a task and stick to it. "How do I create a new spreadsheet, again?" is not a question users want to have to ask more than once every five years; if they're forced to, they'll go back to what they were already comfortable with. This is not a good argument. You act as if just because the software were released everyone would use it. That isn't true. People who like and prefer open office would continue to use it. In fact, the secretary who only uses the computer to take dictation from her boss would never even know it had been released unless she was forced to switch. The simple truth is, either it would be better, and a lot of people would sitch. Or it would blow, and nobody would start using. It certainly can't hurt anything.