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.
actually, they’re dual licensing it…so it can still be part of a commercial product…so as opposed to say an MIT or BSD license, they might actually generate some revenue from it…
personally, i’m not a huge GPL fan…i like the BSD license (W/O advertising clause)
and this is much better than Gobe dying and killing Productive with it
-bytes256
Someone above suggested OpenWorks, so it had to be said: why not FreeWorks? It ties in nicely with your company name, is not Linux (or other OS) specific, and rolls off the tongue fairly well. Also, the meaning is very clear — it is a “Free” (as in Free Software) “Works” package, which to most people would suggest a lightweight office suite.
How about it?
Okay, this may sound incredibly generic, and is probably already taken by a number of applications out there, but how about “Expedience”
Gobe looks and feels polished. It’s an excellent product for Windows users and the fact that linux and other platforms are available makes this an excellent choice. I see a lot of open source software that’s good but does not have near the polish or perfection of Gobe.
OpenOffice is too big and too slow.
For those of your who think GPL is such a bad idea, go ask the guys at Wine about why they went to a GPL license after they got screwed by TransGaming.
What we need now is a standard, open-souce file format that is the default for all of the word processors. If AbiWord, Gobe, OpenOffice, KOffice all supported and used one file format, that would be reasonable for companies to support .doc and one other open source file format.
Now, that would be radical ;>D
“What we need now is a standard, open-souce file format that is the default for all of the word processors. If AbiWord, Gobe,
OpenOffice, KOffice all supported and used one file format, that would be reasonable for companies to support .doc and one
other open source file format. ”
That would have to be an XML format nowadays. Bear in mind that these
“word processors” are not really word processors but limited DTP
programs, so the file format needs to be layout oriented.
Kudos to you guys over at Gobe, you really did some outstanding work. Now lets hope GP gets ported to Mac OS X!
On second thought, tying the name to an OS would not be such a great idea.
Names can be difficult. Some people believe a name of a product should be descriptive enough so that a person to know what the product is by the name alone. Others don’t feel that way at all.
How about SahareSuite?
For those of your who think GPL is such a bad idea, go ask the guys at Wine about why they went to a GPL license after they got screwed by TransGaming.
FRS will be the sole copyright holder of GP and as such can sue license violators — regardless of which OSS license they choose/chose.
What happened with Wine & Transgaming?
You could call it CrossWorks with CrossWord and CrossCalc etc.
This is probably very OT, but can someone tell me about the structure of gobeProductive? I guess that my main questions are:
Does it has it’s own COM system (like UNO in OpenOffice)?
How much work is there in porting it to a new platform?
I’m very nearly finished writing the UNO bridge for the IRIX (N32) GCC port of OpenOffice… I’d love to have the opportunity to port gobeProductive to IRIX.
Cheers,
Ralph
Hrmmm … I thought OpenOffice and StarOffice or even KOffice on KDE were more popular choices for *nix.
Gobe don’t even have a demo version of their Win32 product on their site … so all I’ve got to go on is my experience with the Gobe 2.0 for BeOS. It was average. Very, very, very, very average. Oh, but it can read RTF …
I think I’ve used it probably once or twice. It could never read any of my Word or Excel documents properly – ever ! I wrote to Gobe telling them, this didn’t work, but that was it.
They need to get out of the competing with MS market.
I strongly disagree – Gobe was anything but average. If you used it once or twice, then it is obvious you did not learn the unique way in which one can work with documents – the same document in different modules. The document stays on the desktop in front of you and you can change modules at will.
Dude, there’s a demo version of their Win32 product on download.com linked to in the article. Read the article. It’s good for you.
Thanks, I saw something bought the duel lisence but ti didn’t say much. I’m not a gpl fan ether and have been trying to avoid such programs but this will be a forced exception i guess. It’s good for people in general that now there will be a high quality WP for all OS (Maybe?). Maybe people will yell to use Gobe now instead of openoffice and the such. At least this will be a real response now. I hope some company picks up GP3 and goes someplace with it. Projects without some sort of over powering backing seam to go no where. Best of luck to you GP3 where-ever you go.
Was Gobe still distributing BeOS Pro Edition at this time? (I’ve seen links to other distributors but was wondering).
It would also be sad to have one less BeOS Pro distributor. Anyone know the story on this?
It’s great that BeOS may finally get GP 3.0, but I’m hoping that this doesn’t take steam out of an effort to port OpenOffice. As much is it seems to be generally disliked in comparison to Gobe Productive, it still has a lot more features that make it more comparable to MS Office when dealing with complex documents. (Not everybody needs that, but it’s damn good to have when you do).
The thing I find very positive about a port of OpenOffice to BeOS would be that OpenOffice is already on many more platforms, hopefully this would mean that you could open documents from say, a Linux or Windows partition, in BeOS. This would add greatly to BeOS/OpenBeOS’s useability.
At the Gobe site, for awhile now they’ve had it listed as being out of stock. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the Gobe situation or not. You can get it Purplus.com. Just do a search for beos and it will take you right to it. In fact, they have older versions too.
> 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
Its hard to justify building office suites for old hardware. How many people really need an office suite for a 486 today? Unix has some nice text based office apps that fly on older hardware. In reality I think the greatest need for supporting inexpensive hardware is in the third world and the priorities for supporting for the third world (IMHO) should be set by people living there who understand the environment better.
Given what I know of the third world you can expect users who much more time and much more education than you can in the first world. You can also expect them to be more academic in their orientation and less “business” oriented. They may not care as much about things like: support for .doc format, not having to read a manual. OTOH they may be much more interested in power features like good support for multiple languages in the same document, automated bibliography … Heck things like Emacs / Tex might be a much better choice than OpenOffice for them.
Use something latin like:
publicus -a -um [belonging to the people , public]; ‘res publica’ or ‘respublica’, [the state]. Transf. [universal, general; common; ordinary]. M. as subst. publicus -i, [a state official]; n. publicum -i, [public territory; the public revenue, the treasury; an open place, the open street]. Adv. publice, [for the people, publicly, at the public expense; all together].
I like the play on Publish.
>> 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?
A releases code under two licenses 1 which is commercial or 2 which is GPL. B decides to use the product he either pays for it under (2) or he is bound by (1). Thus if he writes an extension he either A’s permission (since its a commercial setup) or he has to release his changes back the community (including A) under the GPL.
A however still has privledges since he doesn’t need any license to use or distribute his own software.
I’m not sure if this clears it up if not what do you think is violated?
>Its hard to justify building office suites for old hardware.
I would not use Gobe Productive 3 on anything smaller than an Intel Pentium 166-MMX with at least 48 MB of RAM on Win95 or Win98. And that’s already _slow_ for GP3. The vectors used by the office suite (by design) need a much faster cpu. The rest of the suite, like spreadsheet or word, should be adequate on this low end machine, but still slow-ish.
Gobe Productive 2 on BeOS was able to run better on these slow systems, but that was one version ago, and BeOS naturally needed less memory than Windows anyway.
jbolden1517 wrote:
> I’m not sure if this clears it up if not what do you think is violated?
Yes, I’m clear on it now, thank you.
I just hope that FRS can make this business model work.
Good luck FreeRadicalSoftware!
Gobe Team,
Thanks for following your dream and all your hard work. Productive is sweet software.
So I propose ProSuite . ProSuite for BeOS, ProSuite for Linx, ProSuite for Windows and so on. On the other hand just call it …FWord.
Thanks again Gobe Team members
Don
(hope no one elese said somthing simerlar im too lazy to read all 100messsages)
But what would be the chances for getting the BeOS API bindings released under an alternative liecence such as the LPGL so that those people and companys who wrote commerial (closed source) software for BeOS could more easly port software to Windows and linux?
There is a little discussion of Latex as a standard for word processing docs. First off Lyx and Klyx both use this standard to some extent (i.e. they “print” by exporting to Latex and running Latex to generate the print file). Both of them can pass through raw Tex and LaTeX commands.
The real problem I see is what the original poster cited as an advantage. LaTex uses logical design and most word processors use graphical design. That is in in LaTex you would use emph to indicate emphasis and would expect the style sheet to determine if emphasized text should be bolded or italics or a larger / different font or… Word supports style sheets and can be used for logical design however in general users specify bold or italics or… That is the philosophy of LaTex makes it a poor choice for a universal document format.
DVI on the other hand might not be a bad choice for a universal format.
Wow. I’m really saddened that Gobe couldn’t hang in there. It’s a rough marketplace. Like usual, the superior technology/product takes it in the shorts.
I wish all the Gobe employees well in their future endeavors. Thanks for bringing us a great product in BeOS and now Windows. I use both versions.
One of the great things about Gobe, well, more specifically Tom Hoke, he periodically dropped in the chat on BeShare and spent time in the BeGroovy forums, answering questions, asking us questions, and plain being a nice guy.
Also, thanks for GPLing the product so that it may yet live on.
Good Luck. We hoped for a giant killer and all you got was stepped on by the giant. I will use your product until I can no longer. You were heading in the right direction and I had hoped it would last. GPL…? I just hope it doesn’t lose it’s uniqueness with too many mechanics. Too many cooks spoil the broth or something like that…
Al my GRmerer was cheaked by Microsnot Werd [smarttag]
Boy this really sucks…
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.
Quite impossible.
1) License issues: The free version of Productive would have a dual-license. One Free Software, and another probably something like NPL/MPL…
2) The current port of Productive uses Be API wrappers that uses GTK+. In other words, all they need is someone to write a QT-BeAPI wrapper to make it a QT app!
3) Besides that point above, there are many technical difference. The most major one is that Productive is written in C++, and GNOME Office apps is in C, mostly.
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.
You couldn’t possibly put all the blame on MS. Gobe entered the Windows market when Sun decided to pack StarOffice 6.0 with some marketing sense. At $75 dollars, it is the same price as Gobe. That means, you for the same amount of money, you can get better support, more features and better Office support. Plus a database app (just have to put it in :-). To the average Joe, if they would to buy a new Office-like app that isn’t Office, StarOffice would be a better choice, to them, than Gobe’s.
The XML file format they have allows for “extensions” […]
Not certainly the best solution to the problem. Because a document from OOo may look differently in KOffice. And vice versa. But if KOffice supports OOo’s XML’s file format, while keeping its own, probably there is a greater chance of success. :-D.
how about sahare? like gobe for the gobi desert and sahare for the sahara desert! and the sahara desert is expanding, see
Actually it isn’t. It is loosing grown in the north and west faster than it is gaining ground in the south.
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?
Would be the same way OpenOffice.org, Mozilla got to be under 2-3 licenses. The GPL doesn’t disallow the writer of the software to license the software under another license besides GPL (that is, if you own the code).
Rather than Apple chasing OpenOffice, I do not see why they haven’t bought Productiva yet.
It makes much more commercial sense to use OpenOffice.org. Sure, porting is long and hard, but notice, Gobe has so little features, and OpenOffice.org has the best MS filters…
Why aren’t the FREE ones and the DIRT CHEAP ones more popular? Any ideas?
Chances of you not watching a Office XP ad during the launch of Office XP is low. But I have never seen any ads in any major Average Joe media that promotes the use of an non-MS Office app.
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),
Weirdly, a lot of even anti-MS users like Office 2001 (didn’t bother to hunt down for reviews for Office v. X). Besides, most PCs are solded WITHOUT Office. That’s right. Even with tier one OEMs, the most is that Office is an option.
The school gets free copies of Office at a very low cost […]
Huh? A school gets free copies at a very low cost? Isn’t free=no (direct) cost???
Just think of him/her struggling with MS Works and then getting Gobe
Works 2002 is much harder to use than previous versions. Reason: The word processor is seperate, not integrated. But alas, Gobe didn’t have an OEM price as good as Works.
[…]as many aren’t satisfied with OO’s lack of integrity[…]
What did OOo did that was so bad? You mean integration? Hehe
So the reason that M$ gets so much of the market can be contributed to one fact “It won’t change that much”.
Office 97 was much different to Office 95 (and one of the major difference cause a huge backslash).
I think OpenOffice can’t do scripting either.
IIRC, the CVS version could. But I’m not sure.
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.
I uninstalled it the minuted I installed it: I won’t save the documents. I don’t mind the 14 days evaluation thingy, I don’t mind forking 75 bucks over this product if it is good… but?
I wish it had not been GPL’d, I wish it had been shifted to something more like the MIT liscense.
Then any company can fork it and make their own product. There is no reason why the product would have “no guiding course and fall in disaray”, when the same would happen in other licenses (except anti-fork ones). Besides, FreeRadical plans to make money out of it..
ok well I love […] Republican Party…..
God no!!!!!!’
personally, i’m not a huge GPL fan…i like the BSD license (W/O advertising clause)
BSD without the advertising clause would be… MIT license.. Oh well…
OpenOffice is too big and too slow.
Uhmmm, this is not because it is open source. It is because of the legacy Star Division gave it.
For those of your who think GPL is such a bad idea, go ask the guys at Wine about why they went to a GPL license after they got screwed by TransGaming.
Most Wine guys says it is to screw up Lindows, not Transgamings. Transgaming is quite happy with its current codebase, no need to fork from Wine… after all there hasn’t been much significant change in Wine.
How about SahareSuite?
It isn’t a suite of applications, like Office.
You could call it CrossWorks with CrossWord and CrossCalc etc.
All of which runs on CrossOver plugins?
In reality I think the greatest need for supporting inexpensive hardware is in the third world […]
And they don’t buy stuff like 486s :-D.
But what would be the chances for getting the BeOS API bindings released under an alternative liecence such as the LPGL so that those people and companys who wrote commerial (closed source) software for BeOS could more easly port software to Windows and linux?
The wrappers are only for APIs Gobe uses in 3.0. So only Gobe clones or really basic stuff would find this great.
Gobe made a wonderful office suite, I just wish that their libs would be released under MIT/BSD. Thats just me though.
Regards,
Jason
Jason wrote:
> I just wish that their libs would be released under MIT/BSD.
As I understand it, their business model depends on going GPL. It gives them a competitive advantage.
If they went MIT/BSD, any other company could take their hard work (code), relicense it, and do exactly what FRS is doing with it.
There’s a difference between what FRS is doing (will be doing — selling custom software) and simply offering consulting services. Going with the GPL allows them to do the former. MIT-licensing would have them doing the latter and that (in this particular case) would be a Bad Thing.
I’m amazed that FreeRadical and previously GoBe are blind to a golden opportunity… Productive for Mac!!
Microsoft are probably going to abandon Office for Mac, Star Office doesn’t seem likely these days… a huge void is opening, and Productive could step right in.
Mike I think Gobe faced hurdles whichever way they turned. Apple has AppleWorks, which is actually a great program and has a database module, which Gobe doesn’t. And it’s bundled with every consumer Mac. So, I guess they figured Windows might be their best shot. The market is huge, of course. And the other competition (besides MS Office of course) is mostly bloatware or not compelling. I think there was just no way Gobe could get the word out enough, couldn’t get any OEM’s (as far as I know). The reviews were great, the price was right – the Windows world is an odd oneI
I suggest the name “FreeWorks” if that’s not already taken.
FireWorks? Sounds dynamic and exciting.
FireWorks is already taken by Macromedia and it will be conflict, because both FireWorks and GP do vectors.
I would like “OpenWorks”.
I’m amazed that FreeRadical and previously GoBe are blind to a golden opportunity… Productive for Mac!!
The Mac BU said it is giving the Mac one more chance. That means one more version. And if Sun place the same amount of money on the Mac version as on the Windows version, the version of Mac would be completed by time Office is killed by MS… if it is killed by MS.
Also, Gobe would be dirrectly competiting with AppleWorks, not Office. It’s feature-base is relatively the same as AppleWorks.
No, i don’t see a bigger market opportunity than on Windows.
The reviews were great, the price was right – the Windows world is an odd one
The price wasn’t right. My brother said (he is an ex-OEM) he tried to make a deal with Gobe for OEM versions in quantity of a thousand. The price was two times the price of MS Works. Guess which one my brother used? (If you said Works, wrong. He didn’t bother with neither).
FireWorks? Sounds dynamic and exciting.
A trademark of Macromedia. How about WaterWorks?
OpenWorks sounds nice, but for the propreitary version?
http://www.hekkelman.com/
Seems to have closed shop too, shame
I continue to use Gobe Productive on BeOS. I am very saddened to see this news. I am relieved that the software will not be taken to the grave. Maybe I will see version 3 on BeOS some day soon.
Best wishes to all the people at Gobe. You made a difference and there are those of us that REALLY appreciate you.
-Jace
Too bad… Really…
And ‘FreeProductive’ would be a good name (since Google cannot find anything like it), but names with ‘Productive’ are not welcome. So strange: GP is not wellknown, why not use something in connotation to the past? As a tribute to the ‘fans’!
I would not use Gobe Productive 3 on anything smaller than an Intel Pentium 166-MMX with at least 48 MB of RAM on Win95 or Win98
Huh. They tied GP to some libs used for needs of IE and all that “web-integration” M$ crap. So GP cannot work on 95 or on 98 with removed IE.
This is the reason why i dropped my initial intentions to support this woderful team and didn’t buy Windows version of GP, despite GP for BeOS is still my main workhorse – i simply haven’t IE on my home machines.
…again!