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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
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.
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.