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."

Comments

Not enough money to be free...

[dagg]

It seems strange that there not be enough money to release something for free. Sometimes I get the impression that companies would normally release their product for free, but instead they see how much money they can weasel from the open source community. But on second thought, I'm sure that's not what usually happens. What usually happens (or what used to happen), is that companies will just bury their software forever. They hold out hope that their software will make them a buck in the future (somehow).

At least there is nowadays an alternative to burying the software forever.

--YerSex

It's not going to fail...

[JessLeah]

...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.

Re:It's not going to fail...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Woah, woah. Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good. Complain all you like about Microsoft; they've produced an exceptional set of products in Office. It doesn't have anything to do with mindshare or monopoly power.

Consider the Mac. There are basically two office products for the Mac: Office and AppleWorks. Although some people use AppleWorks, Office owns the Mac productivity market. Why? Because Office for Mac is a good-- not perfect, but good-- product.

The answer to the market dominance of Office isn't to prosecute Microsoft for playing unfairly. The answer is to create an office product that's better than Microsoft Office. It shouldn't be too hard; everybody around here always complains about how Microsoft sucks, and how Office sucks, right? So coming up with something better ought to be child's play. ;-)

Re:It's not going to fail...

[spitzak]

If that was true then why is the #1 question asked about any new piece of word processing software is not "is it as good or better than MicroSoft word?" but is instead "how well can it import/export MicroSoft Office?".

Nobody can complete is because the ability to compete requires the ability to read and write a file format that they keep secret. That is monopoly behavior. If Word was so good they should be able to compete just fine reading and writing an open file format.

Reverse engineering this horrendous format requires so much effort that little time is left for making the rest of the program. Also the insistance that the program import and export the format without making too many changes severly limits the ability of the program to treat the text any differently than MicroSoft Word does, thus making "innovation" almost impossible.

do we really need it?

[g4dget]

It seems to me that OpenOffice fills the software category of "Microsoft Office clone" expertly. It is very full featured, XML-based, and is actively being developed by many people. Sure, it's a bit big and sluggish, but that should only make MS Office users feel more at home, and there is no guarantee that Gobe won't be as big and sluggish once it has been made cross-platform and equivalent functionality has been added.

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.

Re:do we really need it? Yes

[bstadil]

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.

Re:There's a reason

[dvdeug]

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.