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

Gobe is/was awesome

[kannibal_klown]

I bought a copy shortly after slashdot posted an article about it. It was a great software package. It was lite and quick, a hell of a lot quicker than OpenOffice and StarOffice, and the interface was just... clean.

My favorite part was the ability to export to PDF so easily.

My only complaint was the Spreadsheet program wasn't as robust as some of the other packages out there, but it still worked.

I hope everything works out for them. Personally, I think this was one of the best office packages around.

Re:Gobe is/was awesome

[Big Mark]

It was designed for the BeOS, which was itself fast, lightweight and clean, so what did you expect?

OK, neither were fully-featured but they did everything 75% of people would ever need.

-Mark

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.

Re:Start a fund?

[BurritoWarrior]

I have alternative suggestion.

Read the artcile.

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.

If the company falls under...

[nlinecomputers]

..what is stopping them from releasing the code as GPL anyway? Is the code tied up as an asset that might be seized by a bank?

Thank goodness.

[Erpo]

I realize most people probably won't agree, but I'm incredibly thankful this thing didn't make it past the beta stage for linux and windows and might not be released under the gpl. I guess that might be considered a loss, as I'm sure it contains some great code that other OSS developers could use or draw from, but it will prevent anyone from finishing the port. In a software category like this (one that's so critical to broadened acceptance of linux on the desktop) I'm a firm believer that competition between products is actually a bad thing.

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.

*The market I'm talking about is inclusion in linux distros. I'm well aware that MS Office is not OSS. ;)

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.

linux beta still available!

[Anonymous Coward]

just google it...
gobe productive 3.0 for linux is right here: http://www.gobe.com/downloads/gobe_linux_x86_insta ll.tgz

This will be a real shame

[X-Nc]

I bought and used gobeProductive on BeOS and also got the WinXX version. I was egerly waiting for the Linux port. Many have already asked the question "Why another Office Suite?". Well, as good as the existing open and commercial office products are they still aren't as smooth and easy as gobeProductive. It doesn't do everything MS Office does but (and follow me on this) it does 100% of the 80% od Office that 95% of the people actually use. And it does that piece better than MS Office and even OpenOffice.

Right now I have on my Linux laptop; Applix Anywhere 2.2, HancomOffice 2, SOT Office (OpenOffice repackeged by SOT), Koffice, and what I call a "best of breed" combination suite of Gnumeric/Scribus DTB/AbiWord/HTMLDOC/Ted. Of these, Applix was the best. Unfortunatly the company has killed it. HancomOffice looks like it might have potential but it's not yet there. OO, and it's like, is very good and makes a great MS Office clone. Unfortunatly it brings with it all the baggage that that intails. gobeProductive was a hope of mine. Sadly, it seems that once again, superior technology loses out.

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.