The news from the Gobe Software front seem to be slightly sad, but only at first glance. Sad because, Gobe as we know it is no more, as it sold the gobeProductive source code and rights to FreeRadicalSoftware, Inc. However, FreeRadicalSoftware’s business plan requires them to GPL the popular office suite, allowing everyone to access gobeProductive’s source for Windows, Linux and even BeOS. The official announcement is expected next week. FreeRadicalSoftware was created recently by the ex-boss of Gobe Software, Bruce Hammond, and some other ex-Gobe and non-Gobe people. Read more for our exclusive interview with Bruce regarding the open sourcing of GP3 under the GPL.
Update: And an additional comment from Gobe’s Tom Hoke.
The story so far
Bruce Q. Hammond co-founded Gobe Software in the winter of 1997 in order to realize a dream to make powerful software more usable by everyone. Hammond brings a wealth of experience from Apple and Claris were he spent three years helping make ClarisWorks the most successful Apple product to date (now renamed AppleWorks after they sold it to Apple some years ago). Prior to joining Claris, Hammond developed consumer digital telephony and co-founded HighTide Software in 1991, now owned by Supra which uses the technology in its line of voice modems.
Gobe Productive started its life as the most advanced and full product ever released for the BeOS platform. After the Be and BeOS demiss, Gobe ported (along with a huge C++ chunk of the BeOS API) their powerful office suite on Windows. The Linux version was in the works for quite some time now and there is already an pre-alpha version to download and try out (note: this Linux build is not current, it is still pre-alpha quality-wise). You can download the Windows demo from here (this version is stable). Word has it that sales in the Windows world, a world governed by Ms Office, were not exactly great, leaving no option to Gobe but to sell the product and free it from its current vulture, sorry I meant venture, capitals.
gobeProductive 3 is a modern office suite, with stronger points on its vector engine and its imaging capabilities. You will also find a powerful word processor and spreadsheet both with compatibility to Microsoft’s formats (.doc & .xls), the ability to be render side by side different elements of the suite in a single file format (eg. you can fully use a spreedsheet view on a text document that also has vector and/or bitmap images), exporting to PDF and HTML, among other file formats. Additionally, the suite comes with a basic presentation application, and while it does not have .ppt compatibility, incorporating the suite’s engine strong vector capabilities, makes it a sexy option too. And all that in a less than 12 MB package (compressed), making it an excellent choice for a speedy, powerful and compact office suite.
Interview with Bruce Hammond
1. So, what is happening with Gobe and gobeProductive 3?
Bruce Hammond: FreeRadical has purchased the rights to develop and market products based on the gobeProductive source code. We have also been working with another company – now called Gobe, LLC- that plans to take over the marketing and
sales and support of gobeProductive 3.x. for Windows There is a perfect continutity there for our users. Exprect to see further press information about this in the next few weeks.
2. Tell us more about Free, Radical Software that you recently founded. Where will it be based and how many people are working currently for this new company?
Bruce Hammond: The company is based in Portland, OR., however we hope to be able to be more decentralized than Gobe was. Ther are 3-4 of us currently involved with forming FreeRadical and setting up its contracts, etc. The company has nobody on its payroll at the moment, but we expect to be at 8-10 full time staff by the end of the year.
3. What Free, Radical Software is indent to do with gobeProductive 3 rights and source code? What other products are you hoping to develop for the new company?
Bruce Hammond: FreeRadical has purchased the gobeProductive source code and plans to continue to develop the product under a GPL license. Our commercial activities will produce customized products based on the technology for special markets. I can’t tell you more than that right now.
4. So, you will open source gobeProductive 3.x under the GPL. Please tell us more about this decision and why you decided to open the product; maybe you could also give us an ETA of its public release.
Bruce Hammond: Since we are wanting to use the technology to make specialized products with custom features for “niche” market areas, it makes tremendous sense to release the underling technololgy as an OpenSource product. We can get lots of contribution from the community to improve that app, to do localized versions, the help port it to other platforms, etc. We stand to benefit tremendously from the GPL licensing..
I think it will take 90 -120 days before the broad public sees the GPL’d software. Some people will see it before that date as we work to roll it out.
5. Is the current GP 3.0.4 still compatible with BeOS? Last time I checked, Gobe’s Tom Hoke was maintaining a BeOS version of GP3 for his personal use. How easy/difficult it would be to backport the GPLed version of GP3 back to BeOS 5?
Bruce Hammond: I think that there is some work involved to bring GP 3.x to BeOS, but it is not a mind-bending amount of work – it is straight forward stuff for the most part… Now under a GPL license, it can happen, were Gobe never had the time or energy to do it.
6. What is the current status of the Linux version of GP3?
Bruce Hammond: The product has improved in the past two months since the Alpha release. It still needs time and attention to get it to commercial quality release under Linux. Obviously we have had some big distractions in the past two months that have kept us from doing all that we had planned.
7. There are some rumors on the web that Xandros was interesting in using exclusively your office suite in the upcoming Xandros Desktop 1.0. What can you tell us about it?
Bruce Hammond: We speak to the Xandros people on a regular basis. Xandros’ plans are their business and should come from Xandros. I don’t know what they plan to do for launch.
Do I think they should use GP? Of course! Its great. 🙂
8. Will the open source version of GP3 use the name “Productive” or are you planning on renaming it?
Bruce Hammond: We are planing to rename it somehow. I would love to get feedback from the community as to what the name should be.
9. What made you pick the GPL and not another open source license?
Bruce Hammond: We plan to dual license the software. The GPL has teeth in it that helps to prevent another commercial competitor from forking the code. Also, GPL is well liked and well understood by the hacker community.
And here is yet one more screenshot of a recent GP3 build for Linux, showing the spreadsheet.
It is sad. I use Gobe on both BeOS and XP. It got excellent reviews when it came out – at least the ones I saw. But, what a tough market to break into. But, good can come of this.
The one thing I alway wondered about regarding Gobe, especially because it was created by ClarisWorks people, is why they didn’t have a database module like ClarisWorks/AppleWorks? That might be something to look into – it would be “complete” then.
I’ve been using Gobe since 2.0 was released. I’ve always felt Gobe and Be were the perfect marriage. Hopefully nothing but good will come from this. Instead of everone busting their butts to port OOO or OOo or whatever to Be, we’ll be able to continue using Gobe….reincarnated.
Wow, that’s a shock. I was recently frustrated with Wordperfect, Word and OpenOffice and had heard of Gobe before and in a spate of irony I had acutally downloaded it this morning. I’m amazed alone at the functionality of the suite and was wanting to purcahse it. I’m a student and don’t really need all the features in Word. I’ll definately be recommending it to friends and classmates. Gobe is much simpler and cheaper. Well, its not all bad news. At least I can get a GPL version for free now.
20 Megs for an entire office suite? Couldn’t find it anywhere else but Gobe.
>20 Megs for an entire office suite?
Compressed, without some sample documents, images etc, it is only 8 MB. With these samples, it is only 12 MB.
It is really compact, as -from what I have heard from people in the know- its source code is of very good quality. NO BLOAT.
Is the BeOS api libs that Gobe used to do this x porting part of the GPL bundle, if so that would be a boon to future BeOS & OBOS developers, allows future BeOS apps not even dreamed to be targeted to Windows, Linux. Perhaps the port could be ported itself to OSX.
This is the way SW should go out if the company can’t stay in business, no pt in taking the crown jewels to the grave.
I have to admire the investors for letting this happen, usually they do what Palm did.
I just tried the linux alpha version and I will buy this when the final version comes out!
It is quite an application, isn’t it? You can stay in the same document, no matter which module you switch to.
Now mabe I can get 3.0 for BeOS!
i’m really sad to see gobe “go Be”, but as end user, i’m thrilled. i still use productive 2 extensively. this is great news. thank you, gobe and free radical.
These guys have my greatest respects for open sourcing their code instead of hogging it to the grace like most do.
I actually like the name Gobe Productive, hope they decide to keep it.
Good luck guys on your ventures.
Really sorry to hear this. I really thought they could make some strides into the marketplace. MacOSX version would make lots of sense. Good luck to all of the hard working Gobe people!
i purchased the 1.x and the 2.x upgrade of Gobe Productive for BeOS and am saddened by the demise of GoBe as we know it.
I guess the “good news” to come out of this is that it will be put under a GPL license for us to embrace and extend.
i’m certainly keen to try and get a look at the add-on source to try and integrate something like the “Get External Data” feature that MS Excel has (from the Excel Tools menu).
And i’ve always wanted to have a look at Toms grid classes in the spreadsheet part of Productive.
cheers
peter
An open-source GPL version of a more-advanced-than-StarOffice technology is a boon to humanity.
#m
Yeah, the news is sad and good at the same time. I wish all the people from Gobe best of luck with Gobe, LLC.
Compressed, without some sample documents, images etc, it is only 8 MB. With these samples, it is only 12 MB.
It is really compact, as -from what I have heard from people in the know- its source code is of very good quality. NO BLOAT
8 megs? That is truely amazing. Yeah, the fact that it is so unbloated is one thing I love about it. I’d like to see microsoft try and make a good office program that’s under 10 megs.
Will they be releasing the binaries in addition to the source code?
Will they be releasing the binaries in addition to the source code?
its GPLed, i’m sure you will be able to find some (look at how XVID’s are done)
This is nothing but amazing news!
Though it comes quite as a shock as Gnome is preparing a GnomeOffice release for end of the year now there is a new free, powerfull and small office that is actually (besides Windows and BeOS of course) based on Gnomelibs.
Now with KOffice, GnomeOffice, OpenOffice.org and Gobe Productive (all of them free), the Unix Office future looks bright for sure!
We have a great chance now to move from our butt and make this Office suit work for Linux! Think about it – making custom modules that make working with MySQL (or other) a breeze for newcommers etc.
You forgot Hancom Office.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=969
I wonder how much trouble it would be to port Productive over to QNX???
To be honest, the trouble should be minimal (considering that this is a full office suite, of course). Allow me to explain.
First of all, GP3 is “small” (for an office suite that is). It is easy to manage and it does not have these zillion and zillion lines of code Star Office or Mozilla has.
Because it originates from BeOS, the Gobe guys had to port a big chunk of the BeOS API to Windows and then to Linux. I believe, the way it is done, is via wrappers. So, “all” you have to do, is wrap the current API you want to port to, around the BeOS one that comes with GP3. There should be some “hooks” in it, to make your porting life easier.
Of course, IF you want to run GP3 via an X Server on QNX, the port should be much easier. But if you want to run it natively, it will need much more work, but not as much as it would normally need for another application of that size and magnitude that comes from another platform.
Same goes for MacOSX. Porting GP3 to OSX natively, it should be many, many times easier than doing so for OpenOffice.org.
what is the link for getting(buying/downloading) the linux alpha for beos?
What?
Microsoft Word 5.1c for Mac was approximately 600K for the complete program! It fit easily on ONE floppy disk.
There is absolutely no reason for multi-megabyte programs other than the possible inclusion into the EXE of resources such as bitmaps, icons, sounds, etc.
I’d love to have a small/light/fast office suit… written from the ground up… and totally tuned for each particular processor.
Maybe Linux will give birth to such a thing sometime.
#m
let me fix the ugly little typo….
what is the link for getting the linux alpha of productive? or is it not available for public testing.
>I’d love to have a small/light/fast office suit…
Times change. The fact that today’s software is bigger is not (only) because the programmers are lazier than in the past, but because they link against huge OS libraries and underlying code, and compilers are generating much more code for optimizations and other reasons. Also, today these office suites do extremely more things that could do 5-6 years ago.
>what is the link for getting the linux alpha of productive?
Did you not read the article? The link is in the article!
And there is both an alpha version of Linux available (just read our article for the link, I won’t give it to ya just like that 
, and a full demo for Windows (non-alpha) can be found on download.com.
Take alook at Papyrus Office from Rom-Logicware:
http://www.rom-logicware.com/start_e.htm
It fits on only 3 floppies.
What will happen to Gobe the compagny ?
If It’s Free how is RFS going to make any money ? ala cygwin ?
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
I’m very sorry to see Gobe Software go, as it’s another domino down. I really don’t think the possibility of getting a GPL’d GP3 on BeOS is worth the loss of Gobe.
I use GP exclusively, and am very sorry to loose (or see fragmented) this very talented and dedicated group of people. We are all loosing on this one, I don’t care what kind of hype comes out of the GPL-hypers. ANY “quality” software such as this at a reasonable (non-MS) price is worth it’s cost & then some!!
Gobe Software was one of only 4 companies (3 1/2 if you count Be, Inc.s efforts) to support my efforts to introduce BeOS into public libraries for the public to use. I don’t think this action was taken for ‘marketing’ reasons, but as a sincere desire to support what they considered a ‘superior technology’. I was never asked to help ‘market’ GP, although I did out of conviction.
My thanks to eveyone at Gobe Software. I’ll be using your innovations and ideas for a long time to come. The fact that I like it so much is the best compliment I think I can pay to you all!
Cale Lewis
For those of us who put our life blood and quite a bit of savings into it, Gobe’s demise is a hard blow
But my worst fear was that all the effort would go completely to waste with the IP being sold to the highest bidder (who would probably shelf it) and us being forever locked out of using the source. So if Free Radical can succeed in getting the IP GPL’d that at least will allow our efforts to live on. If you can’t win it’s nice to know you at least made a difference. I also have hope that Gobe LLC will be able to successfully market the Windows product where we, an impoverished nearly engineering only company, could not.
For all those we courted who ultimately couldn’t see why we had something of tremendous value they should invest in – I hope a GPL’d version of the product and the LLC agreement will make them regret their lost opportunities.
-Tom Hoke
(Gobe Software, Inc.)
> Compressed, without some sample documents, images etc, it is only 8 MB. It is really compact, as -from what I have heard from people in the know- its source code is of very good quality. NO BLOAT.
Let’s hope thats not due to the lack of comments in the source code.
> Let’s hope thats not due to the lack of comments in the source code.
Which shows how much you know about programming. Comments are removed by the preprocessor before they reach the compiler. They are not included in the final executable or libs.
I dislike their attitude. They try to manipulate the community: “we’ll release it as GPL, and then you’ll work for us in your spare time, so we can make more money”.
Together with SoundPlay, this was the first app I got after buying R3.2 IIRC. It’s kind of sad to see them struggle for years and then don’t make it in the end after all (Windows seems to be an even less profitable market than BeOS for office suites)…
OTOH, open sourcing it is providing us with a 1st class office suite once OBOS is out! Thanks Gobe!!
The one thing I found strange or funny in a way is that Bruce seems to have sold the code to himself. Neat trick
I use a purchased copy of GobeProductive 3 on Windows when I can, because I really like it, but lately have turned to OpenOffice more often than not.
Here’s why: I use Windows and Linux, and if I use OpenOffice I can move documents between computers easily. Gobe’s Linux alpha is not stable enough (for me) to use daily.
<worrisome rant>
So now that I hear about this GPL release, I get a sinking feeling, because the reason I’m using OpenOffice instead of Gobe is the same reason most people use Microsoft Office instead of OpenOffice (or Productive, or other alternatives).
This caused a blinding flash of the obvious, but I don’t see it repeated here, so I’ll throw it out: although more viable free productivity software choices are good for the consumer, more viable productivity software choices are better for the Microsoft monopoly, and that’s a bad thing.
Why? Well, it’s one thing if all of your Linux guys would rather use OpenOffice, and the rest of the company uses Word. What if some of your Linux guys use OpenOffice, some use Productive, and some use Hancom Office…and now we have all FOUR products unable to share documents unless they’re in Microsoft Word “format” (and I use the term loosely, since I’ve been told it’s just a file containing a snapshot of the document’s state in memory).
The only way to avoid this is to create a solid standard for all non-office suites to use. Right now OpenOffice has their own format, plus .doc. Productive has their own format, plus .doc. Obviously I’m not counting things like RealText Format and such, since you generally lose formatting when you save in such formats.
You know, it’s kind of like all of the Linux software installation methods…each one has strengths and weaknesses, but until a standard is agreed upon (a good one, mind you, not just any standard) the installation process for software will always seem inferior to that of Windows. Office document formats are similar.
Bottom line: choice is good, but little fractured fiefdoms surrounding the city-state are not going to have an effect unless they all coordinate their own unique styles of attack to occur at the same time.
</worrisome rant>
At last an office for linux that is fast AND pretty complete. Openoffice is complete, but slow and koffice is fast, but lacks…
A lot of respect from me for thes big step. Congratulations.
A name: GoProductive
It shows it’s roots, but still has a nice ring to it. And the entire name has a meaning as wel…
Hope palm follows you’re idea… Probably not, but I can still have hope, no?
My previous post was my own personal opinion about Gobe as the company I helped found. I have great hopes and expectations for Free Radical and Gobe LLC.
-Tom
I save everything as either a .txt or .pdf file.
I work here at a company in Taiwan. I have to deal with Microsft Word documents on a daily basis from Taiwan, China, Germany and the US. A document gets emailed here, someone opens in Chinese Windows and forwards it to me running a US English system and likely as not the document is fractured. And this is all while running Micosoft products with supposedly compatible file formats.
“The only way to avoid this is to create a solid standard for all non-office suites to use. Right now OpenOffice has their own format, plus .doc. Productive has their own format, plus .doc. Obviously I’m not counting things like RealText Format and such, since you generally lose formatting when you save in such formats.”
This is happening of course, all free office suites will support it of course and I expect GP to follow. MS Office obviously won’t.
http://xml.openoffice.org/
The more support we get for this file format, the better! Once you will have the choice to use this default document format and share your documents among a plethora of office suites, or to use .doc and get compatibility problems.
Of course I hope that MS will one day also jump on the bandwagon and support this open fileformat. They also support open web standards so I still believe that it’s possible.
Getting open file formats and protocols is IMO even more important than free software. Once we get compatibility, nobody can be forced to use any proprietory application anymore (because all his friends use it or it’s required for his work, etc) and that should be the goal.
This is also the reason, why I’m constantly connected to the Jabber IM network besides ICQ, although so far I don’t talk with anyone using this protocol. =) But the fact that it’s _possible_ to message me over an open protocol just makes me feel better. And as Gaim has great support for both Jabber and ICQ (and others), there is no reason why I shouldn’t do it.
Everyone’s talking about open office file formats, but nobody ever mentions going back to the roots of word processing; chapters, sections, paragraphs.
In LaTeX you specify the logical structure of a document using various “markup” commands:
itle{Introduction to LaTeX}
author{Prof. A. Name}
date{ oday}
maketitle
ableofcontents
chapter{Introduction}
Here we talk about LaTeX….
section{How to set it up}
…
etc.
With this, you won’t -ever- need to worry about opening a file. This is a file in (La)TeX format, which then translates to PDF/PS/HTML/TXT/RTF/whichever through the intermediate format DVI, which can be viewed using xdvi, BeDVI and more.
There’s a port of the unixtex package for Windows over at http://www.miktex.org and for UN*X you get it from http://www.ctan.org
I wrote a (very) brief description of LaTeX with a couple of links to tutorials (among which “The (Not So) Short Introduction To LaTeX” is the one I’ve found the most useful) — http://dundermusen.net/texts/20020726/gimme_latex
—
Mikael
BeDevID #E-20392
Each of the mark-up commands have a backslash in front of it (i.e., backslash-chapter, etc.)
Well, XML is our todays most modern and standardized markup language so where is the big difference?
Every office application or viewer will (could) be able to read and write those XML files.
ANY “quality” software such as this at a reasonable (non-MS) price is worth it’s cost & then some!!
Of course, there aren’t any company that manage to undercut MS’s prices by a whole lot while making a profit.
This is happening of course, all free office suites will support it of course and I expect GP to follow. MS Office obviously won’t.
http://xml.openoffice.org/
IIRC, KOffice and AbiWord planned to have support for StarOffice’s XML files. But I think formats should be open, but NOT standard. What happen if Product Y wants to implement feature X, but isn’t supported by the standard format Z? See my point?
Besides, Microsoft is moving slowly to XML-based formats in their Office products, but it wouldn’t, for sure, be the same as OpenOffice.org’s formats.
Where do you put the images and the embedded stuff when you save to XML?
“IIRC, KOffice and AbiWord planned to have support for StarOffice’s XML files. But I think formats should be open, but NOT standard. What happen if Product Y wants to implement feature X, but isn’t supported by the standard format Z? See my point?”
No I don’t, as XML is completely extendable. If one application wants to implement a new feature but the others don’t there is no reason why there shouldn’t be a standard XML definition for it anyway. If one application doesn’t have support for any of the XLM markups, it will just ignore them.
That’s exactly how web standards work and you aren’t complaining about that, are you? Also as KOffice and Gnome Office are indeed planning to support it, it doesn’t really matter anymore what _we_ think. =)
OpenOffice’s file-formats are zips (gzipped) containing XML and the ’embedded’ files. These files are referenced in the XML. I can open an OpenOffice file using WinZIP to get at the files – it’s lovely
Although it’s not usually done XML can have binary segments (CDATA sections? – anyway, I forget the exact name, but you get the idea).
//
I think the important point is that once a file-format is in XML it’s much easier to move around to other formats. XSL-T, and other transformation languages make the job relatively easy. I wrote a translator from Docbook to HTML 4.01 in about three hours using XSL-T, and without following any documentation (I knew HTML 4.01, I didn’t know Docbook, I just had a look at the file-format). It’s still an effort, and any professional effort would have done a bit more research, but I guess I must have been lucky because it’s still working without any problems. It’s considerably easier to do this than to convert a binary format.
There will be competing XML document formats, and there will always be problems where one application doesn’t understand a certain format, but the converters between XML dialects are much easier to write.
So if they are going to release it under the GPL, why are they asking money for it? Is the final version for linux going to free? Thanks.
GPL? I don’t get their ‘niche’ business plans, what a cold blood. Anyway, I expect Beunited taking a look at a GP3 for BeOS/OBOS.
Free software (OpenOffice) and Microsoft kill another start-up! Hooray!
Sorry to see you go, guys.
– chrish
Have the Gobe Office and GNOME Office people considered merging their projects? If I remember correctly, Gobe Office is based on GNOME’s libs, so there’s real potential for GNOME office to be merged with a GPLed Gobe Office.
The incentive for the Gobe Office people is that they’ll get free advertisement from being included in the GNOME distribution, like GNUcash, and they’d get extra voluteer help to port it to other architectures, write OpenOffice compatibility code and add any features that GNOME Office has that Gobe Office doesn’t.
The incentive for the Abiword people is that they’d get more functionality and a pure Gtk+ port so they could achieve their long term vision today. They’d lose one or two platforms, but the effort it would take to port Abiword to GNOME 2 could be redirected to porting Gobe Office to the missing platforms.
Gnumeric wouldn’t gain much other than better integration with other office apps, but this is a big enough win.
The other GNOME office apps would gain immensely.
>>>>Have the Gobe Office and GNOME Office people considered merging their projects? If I remember correctly, Gobe Office is based on GNOME’s libs, so there’s real potential for GNOME office to be merged with a GPLed Gobe Office.
Gobe is going the dual license route, a proprietary license and GPL license — that doesn’t mix with GNOME.
uh, it’s not because they’re based on the same libs that they can easily or realistically be merged…
Well, this would explain why it has been so quiet on the Gobe Forums lately. This is a real tragedy and another underdog is slayed by the mighty dragon of MS. The reality is that Gobe Inc. was a handful of people who devoted all of their time (and probably all of their savings) into a dream, only to see it die because of forces beyond their control. I hope that gP 3 can finally be ported to BeOS and OSX, and gain a loyal following. I am certainly not going to stop using it. Thanks to everyone at Gobe Inc. for their dedication and hard work.
The XML file format they have allows for “extensions” which are ignored unless the app reading the file understands it, so if KOffice or OpenOffice or whatever want to add a feature, they can and every other app will perform “gracefully” – you will just lose whatever it was you had added. But when you save the document in another office suite, it keeps the unrecognised data, too. Good, hey?
Spend a few hours at work without browsing the web, and this is what you miss.
Way to go Eugenia… nice scoop. 😉
But seriously. I like others, have mixed feelings. I’m still in the reaction stage, so I don’t quite know what ot make of this news.
I’ve followed the company’s moves since their inception, and have always had a warm place in my heart for their efforts.
Tom, and gang… Here’s a cheery hello to brighten your day.
-Chris Simmons,
Avid BeOS User.
The BeOSJournal.
Bruce Hammond: We are planing to rename it somehow. I would love to get feedback from the community as to what the name should be.
how about sahare? like gobe for the gobi desert and sahare for the sahara desert! and the sahara desert is expanding, see? oh, and the next software suite released by FRS could be called krishna — sahare krishna
GobeProductive is a really great piece of software, it’s a shame the company couldn’t make money out of it, but well thanks for making sure the software is relicensed so that people can carry on using it.
As an aside, i think one of the major problems with linux so far is the lack of a free office suite that runs well on low end systems (think P2 or even P1) – don’t say koffice, kde3 crawls on systems like this(gnome2 is better but on slower systems you have to go for something even lighter), and koffice is still slow even if you don’t run kde. Abiword is good, but is only a word processor – hopefully GobeProductive can fill this gap.
My last bastion had fallen. Gobe was a good argument to demonstrate BeOS to new people. “Yeah, BeOS is nice but do you have apps for it ?” – Gobe was the answer.
Well, after Be gone it was just a matter of time.
It’s nice intention to go GPL and this will give a very good app to OBOS project. No matter what people say about free software – the competition in FSF world is more fierce than in closed source software. I expect that OpenOffice with Sun backing it up will rule linux world. The only niche for open sourced GP is non-X based windowing system like OBOS and Syllable.
Really sorry to see Tom’s (ah those times in BeShare) and the rest of gang’s (Kurt, etc) efforts end up like this… a bunch of very skilled coders, and the ones i know, very nice people also. Best of luck for the future, i hope we’ll see more quality software come out of your PCs.
About the “GPLization” of GP… mmmmmmmmmmm… i hope it’s for the best, i agree with what Tom Hoke said. And i hope to see it on BeOS.
DaaT
The BeOSJournal
9. What made you pick the GPL and not another open source license?
Bruce Hammond: We plan to dual license the software. The GPL has teeth in it that helps to prevent another commercial competitor from forking the code. Also, GPL is well liked and well understood by the hacker community.
I’m curious to know how such a dual-licensing scheme like this can work. Will the other license be a typical commercial one? If so, how does that not violate the GPL?
The last time I checked MS Word supported installable file converter/filters. I am surprised no one (to my knowledge) has investigated creating a downloadable MS Word file filter that would allow MS Word users to open/save Open Office doc formats. That way you could send native OOffice docs with abandon to MS Word users and just refer them to the downloaded filter to install.
Maybe I’m missing something?
-CB
“I’m curious to know how such a dual-licensing scheme like this can work. Will the other license be a typical commercial one? If so, how does that not violate the GPL?”
as the owners of the code they can license it under as many licenses as they see fit. essentially think of it this way, they have 2 code archives you can download, one thats covered by gpl, and one thats covered by some other license.
>I’m curious to know how such a dual-licensing scheme like this can
>work. Will the other license be a typical commercial
>one? If so, how does that not violate the
Actually, no. GPL respects the rights of the original developer. The
original developer of the code can do whatever s/he wants with the code (change licence, sell binaries etc), but restricts everyone that wants to use the original developers code. Linux could very well have changed licence unless so many did not contribute. Every developer that contributed needs to agree to the change. MySQL is a good example of a dual licence by the way. This is also one of the reasons, I guess, that Kurt (AtheOS) does not accept patches from other developers.
Regards
/Procton
… it is no wonder that gobe could not succeed in the window market. This market is closed, beneath MS Office, even the bigger ones like Lotus and Corel have their problems to survive, and there is a big open sourced alternative: OpenOffice. The only markets are those little ones, like BeOS, QNX, or even Apple.
But gobe supposed them to be to little, so gobe turned away to start barking with the big dogs.
You should have known better!
I am curious as to why Apple has not bought this product?
Apple and Microsoft are not the best of friends right now.
Rather than Apple chasing OpenOffice, I do not see why they haven’t bought Productiva yet. If Productiva were to be Cocoaized (isn’t that the native Mac OS X API?), this could free them from a reliance on Microsoft’s office monopoly.
OK, so nobody should be complaining now that they can’t afford an office suite; there are good free ones available, and the others are cheap as chips. This is good news, for Joe Average, at least.
So why is the ridiculously overpriced MS Office sooooooo popular? Is it a question of marketing? Do people care that there are free ones out there that they can use happily, or do they have to have what they use at work? Or at school? ie. MS Office? Is it too much of a hassle to learn a second office suite?
I just don’t understand why MOST people feel the need to pay for Office to do their basic wordprocessing and spreadsheets & presentations in. Why?
Why aren’t the FREE ones and the DIRT CHEAP ones more popular? Any ideas?
Ophidian wrote:
“I’m curious to know how such a dual-licensing scheme like this can work. Will the other license be a typical commercial one? If so, how does that not violate the GPL?”
as the owners of the code they can license it under as many licenses as they see fit. essentially think of it this way, they have 2 code archives you can download, one thats covered by gpl, and one thats covered by some other license.
OIC — if you download the GPL’d version, you can get the source with it if you like. OTOH, if you download the non-GPL’d version, you get whatever binaries they give you. This sounds very good.
So, FreeRadicalSoftware could extend the GPL’d version for some niche customer, and then give the extended product only to them, likely relicensed (since FRS is the copyright/copyleft holder). Excellent.
Procton wrote:
GPL respects the rights of the original developer.
The copyright (erm.. copyleft) holder. Got it.
The original developer of the code can do whatever s/he wants with the code (change licence, sell binaries etc), but restricts everyone that wants to use the original developers code.
Thanks. Hmmm… though, I think you specifically mean distribute rather than use, no?
Thank you for the explanations.
…sincerely. The one thing I’ve pretty consistently missed since becoming an OS X user was gobeProductive.
Kind of ironic, in some ways; every friend I’ve talked to thought OS X would have been the perfect market for gobeProductive. The users here aren’t nearly as comfortable with Microsoft products (and we don’t get Microsoft Office slapped onto our system at purchase, generally), and after the moderate fiasco of AppleWorks 6, many of them would have loved to see something that could be advertised as “by the original developers of AppleWorks 5.”
I’d like to think a GPLed gobeProductive would have a greater chance of having a Cocoa port done, but I have a very strong suspicion that’s in the “much easier said than done” category.
>Thanks. Hmmm… though, I think you specifically mean distribute rather than use, no?
Heh… yes. That is what I meant.
/Procton
FRS Productive. I think it should go on with Productive in its name. Everybody already says Productive.
Glib Wrote:
OK, so nobody should be complaining now that they can’t afford an office suite; there are good free ones available, and the others are cheap as chips. This is good news, for Joe Average, at least.
So why is the ridiculously overpriced MS Office sooooooo popular? Is it a question of marketing? Do people care that there are free ones out there that they can use happily, or do they have to have what they use at work? Or at school? ie. MS Office? Is it too much of a hassle to learn a second office suite?
I just don’t understand why MOST people feel the need to pay for Office to do their basic wordprocessing and spreadsheets & presentations in. Why?
Why aren’t the FREE ones and the DIRT CHEAP ones more popular? Any ideas?
It’s actually quite simple as to why MS Office is so popular. First it’s portability of the documents you create in word. You can save the documents as nearly any type of word processing system out there. It’s almost the idea of “One ring to rule them all …”
Second it’s a required course at most universities. I’m very serious here, many universities require you to learn the MS Office Suite. So people see that the regular Office XP costs $550.00 and they see Office XP for Students for $120.00 and they think they’re getting a good deal. People use what they know.
The school gets free copies of Office at a very low cost ( http://www.microsoft.com/education/ ). So the school is able to cut costs of software and the teachers can teach from the million books written on office. There are very few “Mastering WordPerfect (etc.)” books in the school textbook market right now.
It’s the same phiolosophy as apple “get um at work and school and sell um at a bulk rate, then they’ll buy one full price at home.” No one remembers going to school and playing Oregon Trail on a IBM, no sir we played on Mac’s … with console appleworks too (man that was a PITA to use)
To Tom Hokes: You did make a difference. Gobe for BeOS and Windows is an amazing product. I know people who have never used it don’t know exactly how the program works, which is, among other things, so cool. So very cool.
It would make no sense for Gobe to have tried to compete with AppleWorks on consumer Macs (AppleWorks comes free on all consumer Macs).
MS Office: it is true that its big feature is portability. However, for Joe User who buys a home PC, Gobe was beautiful. Just think of him/her struggling with MS Works and then getting Gobe – what a difference!
I don’t know what type of things will come because of GPL, but I hope it retains the way you create and work on documents. Just because of that alone, it blows all other Linux office products out of the water.
Personally I like the “Go Productive” suggestion very much.
It really has a nice and positive ring to it.
BTW, people are always talking about speed, price, usability, etc, but is GP really _that_ powerfull that it can compete with MS Office or Star Office in features? Or is it rather for those cases where you don’t need a full featured office suite? I tested the Linux Pre-Alpha and I really like the app but I can’t really get an idea of it’s features as I usually don’t use office applications. The only thing I ever got some in-depth knowledge of was MS Access but this is not available at least.
People might switch in masses from OpenOffice to GP (at least the GNOME users) as many aren’t satisfied with OO’s lack of integrity and speed and only use it for it’s sheer power and features. That’s why KOffice and Gnome Office are so popular although they are rather rough and uncomplete yet.
You who read this is most certainly computer savvy, and even if you don’t count yourself to the category who could write an office suite if given time and motivation, you surely know your way around a computer.
Not only that, you could make a switch to another piece of software, even if you would have to modify the way you work somewhat along the way. For us moving to another office suite is no problem at all.
For the large masses that care more about football, cars, getting enough money to live, their ill child or mother, etc, etc, the situation is different. If they get schooling in Office suite A, they can use office suit A. But if anything all of a sudden becomes different, the whole thing falls to the ground. There are people who are still terrified of computers and can’t even do the most mudane and simple things you and I do as easily as breathing.
Does this make them imperfect humans? Just because they don’t find Free Software/GPL to be the most important thing in the universe? Unless your biggest Idols are Usama and Adolf you probably don’t think so, at least not when you think for a while.
So the reason that M$ gets so much of the market can be contributed to one fact “It won’t change that much”. The applications works in the same way (File meny to the left, help to the right), looks the same (one toolkit (except somehow they started to slightly screw it up with XP, I get “old” style widgets, bad Microsoft, bad bad!)).
If Apple had played their cards better (or if Bill had known Woz instead of Jobs;)) the situation could be the exact same with them. MacOS X is good enough to be a general purpose OS for most peoples needs.
This is the biggest problem for Linux for sure. There are too many “just do this” solutions (I shouldn’t need to do anything, if it doesn’t work from the beginning, it is broken, same goes for Window), too many different toolkits, applications that does the same thing, different themes and ideas and looks, etc etc.
This is what makes Linux fun for people who like to spend their time in front of a computer. This is a nightmare for a user that is scared at computers or just wants to “surf, read email and do my job”. The problems are not about GPL or bad code. It is not a technical problem, it is a packaging problem.
But over to Gobe. I hope they have a good (looked over by a good financial advisor) plan and that they can make it, but I think that it can be hard. Few companies have good times now, and the software biz is not going well at all. And giving away your product seldom gives $$$.
My little tip is “Make a native version of Gove for MacOS X and sell it”. There is a huge market there of people with 1. money (those Macs are expensive to the point of silly) and 2. a hate for Microsoft (read: Office). At least do it before I do, or it will be to late
Apparently I’m one of the “too few” people that purchased Gobe Productive. I purchased version 2.0 for BeOS and 3.0 for Windows/Linux just so I could get the Linux version. I’m still hoping that comes out. But I’m now really really hoping that 3.0 is ported back to BeOS as OpenBeOS seems to have their act together and by next year this time we will have a better BeOS than Be gave us. Very cool!!!
There is one feature that I would LOVE to have in Productive. And that’s QuickCorrect (this is what WordPerfect calls it. Majorsuck calls it Autocorrect.). For anyone that doesn’t know. It capitilizes the first word of any sentence, capitalizes the letter “I” and “I’m” and lets you easly (through right clicks and menus) build a list of words that you want “quickcorrected” when you type them so that you don’t have to manually capitalize them or “quickcorrects” common misspellings.
Seriously. This is easily the biggest thing not currently in Productive that I would use. Anything else wouldn’t be used as much by me.
LinuxWorks
Free2Be Productive
or
Free-to-Be Productive
or
FreeToBe Productive
(I’m open to suggestions on the semantics of the name o_O )
Personally, I like it (why else would I suggest it, right?
. It has the word “free” in it, which ties in FreeRadicalSoftware’s name (by the way, that name kicks ass. Hey Bruce, do you come up with these company names? I always thought GoBe was terribly clever). It also represents a nod to the open source aspect of the project (i.e. free speech). The name also retains the word “Productive”, which has always been the product’s name and should not be changed, IMHO. Finally, the name stands on it’s own as a statement in and of itself, just like the name “GoBe Productive” did, while at the same time evoking a more light-hearted feel. It’s as though by using this product, you are saying to everyone that you *choose* to use it and are *free* from being forced to work in an Office-centric world. Dig?
So what do you guys think?
It’s sad to see a company which i’ve only heard awesome things about die, but i do think that people should look at what was done here as an example of how to properly lay a company to rest. Sure GoBe wont live anymore, but the fruit of their labor will, and with a license like GPL, its sure to live for a while yet.
I for one cant wait till linux versions start popping up (OpenOffice doesnt work on DEC Alphas
).
I’m too one of the few who bought GP twice – one for BeOS and one for Windows hoping to get free upgrade.
To Spark:
there are features that are really great in GP –
– I like ability to save in PDF format. This feature alone is worth the money you put in. Graphic editor is good although BeOS had some better choices. Presentation app is really great. I used it when I need. The only problem – it cannot import MS PowerPoint crap so I hd to download PPviewer as I have lots of ppt docs.
– and think of ability to safely open any MS word document whithout being infected by some macro viruses. Not all clients I go have good antivirus policy in place.
Alternative Office Suites :
I remember when people were forced to switch from WordPerfect to MS Word – WP was a standard at law offices. Nice, fast, integrated with document management systems.
But it was DOS based and company was moving to NT and they got ‘good deal’ on a bundle.
Still, I see sometimes clients who are completely anti-microsoft : they run Novel as network OS, GroupWise as colloboration system, Domino as e-mail and Corel Office.
It just take a lot of efforts to keep MS out of your company and many companies gave up – let one Micorosoft product inside and sooner than you want all your company is converting to it.
There are few persuasion tricks that almost every CIO is falling into :
– “it’s much easier to manage – click here and here and there”
– “it’s very integrated ”
– “you don’t need to worry about upgrades – it’s compatible”
and the best of all – “you won’t be fired for buying MS”
Of all these only the last one is true but I hope not for long.
.. but kudos on the developers to have the wisdom not to let their hard work go to waste.
Let’s hope “Productive” soon becomes a common part of any opensource Desktop, whatever name it goes under by then.
I love the name “LinuxWorks!
Don’t tie the name up with a platform, ala “LinuxWorks”. This should be available on any platorm, so it wouldn’t make sense to run a program called LinuxWorks on Windows.
I say make the name an extension of what they already have – but instead of Productive, it should be MoreProductive. More signifying the next chapter in the software’s evolution, ties into the fact that it makes you more productive when you use it, more productive than with Word, etc. etc.
Well, that’s my two cents for the day. I’m seriously saddened to see things go the way they have but hopefully five years down the road we’ll say this is the best thing they could have done. Best of luck to all members of the Gobe team!
OBOS Productive. That would integrate well to the upcoming OpenBeOS platform.
GPL != Linux
Seriously, remember such a quality office suite is going to be used on many systems.
I would also offer my thoughts on Gobe, but I think everythings been said…
>I love the name “LinuxWorks!
>OBOS Productive
Problem is that Productive is a real multi-platform product. LinuxWorks or OBOS Productive wouldn’t be very representing names for all the platforms it runs or will run on.
I would vote for “Sahare Office” or similar, as the other guy said ealier…
Please people, don’t try to tie the name in with an operating system! It’s already available on more than one OS, and hopefully will make it’s way to many more. And while I thought the LinuxWorks name was pretty clever, it was totally inappropriate for this product, which neither started on Linux nor is even available on Linux yet (pre-alpha version notwithstanding). A more viable name along the same vane would be “OpenWorks” (unless it’s already taken, of course
. I like Big Al’s idea (MoreProductive) and naturally, I thought my suggestion was pretty keen (FreeToBe Productive).
Anyway, my 2 cents…
I’ve been waiting and waiting for the Linux version of Gobe Productive to come out… While it’s sad that Gobe as a company didn’t make it, turning GP3 into GPL’ed code is a great boon to GP users everywhere!!!
Perhaps now I can get a native FreeBSD port of this excellent office suite!!!
how is a name like Linux Works or OBOS Works clever?
Works’s have been done over and over and over again
I like “Gobe Productive”. Anyway “FreeRadicalProductive” could do it too. Please, don’t use the “office” word in it, Be yourself!
I have a coupon for a free Linux version from buying the Windows version. I feel ripped off!!! Oh, wait a minute…
GoPro.
And I’ll not have another word (no pun intended) said.
IT DOESN’t HAVE TO HAVE THE WORD “PRODUCTIVE” in it. In fact, Bruce on the phone told me that he wouldn’t want to see the word “productive” or “open productive” in the new name!! He wants a new, fresh name for it!
Okay, maybe clever was a little too complimentary. Sheesh! Don’t get your panties in a twist over it, though. I was just trying to show the guy that while I appreciated his contribution, I thought it would be a sucky name for this particular product
yeah…maybe i was a tad too harsh…i was still thinking what a f*ing idiot…Linux Works…and then I read your post…oooooooops
Well, I was more talking about the real office functionality. When working with Access for a year, I was just impressed with the possibilities. Sure, it wasn’t exactly stable and sometimes drove me crazy, but I could do basically everything with VB scripting, macros, etc. I also worked a little bit with Word and took a short look at Excel so I could at least see that they were almost as functional.
This might be overkill for most users but as a matter of fact, many of those features where very usefull for me to get the job done. I’m just wondering if Gobe can even remotely keep up with this featureset or if it’s rather meant mainly to create simple documents with images.
Can someone who has used the program tell me:
1. How well does it import Word .docs? Does it handle tables and
graphics correctly?
2. Does the PDF output include embedded fonts?
3. How well can it export for Word? Tables? Graphics?
‘Horses for Courses’ as the saying goes….you wouldn’t use a toffee hammer to attempt a job that required a sledge hammer.
Productive is an excellent office suite which was never designed to have the feature set of Office. However, it is far more capable than you seem to be suggesting.
>2. Does the PDF output include embedded fonts?
By default YES. You can take this out if you want, by clicking “Settings” on the “Save As” panel, when you select to save as PDF.
>3. How well can it export for Word? Tables? Graphics?
Isn’t that a similar question as No1?
Well, it can do tables and graphics and all that, but it does not support VBA and scripting. So, if your Word documents have scriptings, they won’t render correctly. I think OpenOffice can’t do scripting either.
Its .doc compatibility is not the best, but it is pretty good. There IS room for improvement indeed.
Why don’t you download the Windows demo to check it out (version of the demo is 3.02, current full version is 3.04). It is only 12 MB to download and it is linked from ther article.
Hey, no problem. Actually, his post kinda pissed me off at first, too. I always find it very ballsy of some members of the Linux crowd that try to hijack any project that gets GPL’d and pass it off as some sort of Linux innovation or something. Seems very arrogant to me.
🙂
This is sad news to return to. I hope the best for those who worked for Gobe. I bought GP3 and it was worth every penny. I love it. And gobe was very helpful with any problems or dealing with bugs people found. I wish it had not been GPL’d, I wish it had been shifted to something more like the MIT liscense. I fear GP3 becoming some case for OS zelouts and such. I’m glad I have my GP3 cd to use forever. It will be nice to see GP3 on things like OBOS (when the day comes) and OSX and more. I wish Gobe was the ones to do it though. I fear any support or feature improvement will no longer happen under GPL, it will become a program with no guiding course and fall in disaray. If it had not been GPL’d but had been opensourced maybe some other company would pick it up and use it. Maybe apple would have picked up and based an office suite on it. I doubt with it being GPL they will want to.
Just goes to figure, everything i like seams to die, ok well I love GM, Disney, Wal-mart, Linux, Gateway, Republican Party….. Well thats enought to see if they die now