The exclusive news we broke last Monday, regarding gobeProductive going GPL in the very near future, have been going around the biggest sites on the web. We hear that the C++ source code of GP3 is of exceptional quality, and its creators are hoping into a broad participation of developers after its release. Because of its very clean codebase, GP3 is many times smaller and easier to handle, programming-wise, compared to, let’s say, OpenOffice.org. We asked Bruce Hammond, now CEO of FreeRadicalSoftware, regarding the general portability of the software and the possibility of an OSX port. Bruce replied: “A port to OS-X is possible and very likely in the near future (8 month timeframe). We are starting a project to clean up the cross-platform engine and make moving GP to new platforms simpler.”
MacOSX Port of gobeProductive a Strong Possibility
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
With the OpenOffice.org port to OS X, and now this, who cares if Microsoft leaves the Mac platform and takes Office with it.
I agree, once that happens and the “alternatives” standardize on a non .doc file format, it might just end the MS Office monopoly.
This is the way to go.
I installed the beta version for linux and “whoah!!” it’s really good, fast, well integrated into GNOME, good support for doc format, etc… 🙂
Just because of this really office suite I’m considering into move back to GNOME after more than 2 years with KDE. I’m amazed by the work of Gobe guys. It’s a pitty they didn’t suceed in their business.
Now, if it suceeds in the GPL world I hope to see lots of versions for different plataforms such as KDE, qnx, windows, etc. So we finally have a quality GPL multi-platform office suite (where quality is not only features and suport for MS doc but also being fast and clean)
I had wondered before why they didn’t do a Macintosh version. After all, when they announced the Windows port, MS Office for macintosh sucked (this was pre Office X). Sure, the target market is much smaller, but it’s also a lot less dominated. Also, the GOBE guys wrote AppleWorks/ClarisWorks.
I bought productive 2.0 for BeOS. I never really used it, but I thought it was amazingly slick. I was planning on buying v 3.0 for windows, but It dropped off my radar screen and I forgot about it until I heard it was being reclassified.
I hope the new venture works out better.
That’s wonderfull news!
I wonder if a dual license (GPL and commercial) would be a better option for Gobe office. I think a GPL only option would lack the solid corporate backing that made Gobe Productive possible in the first place. I think a dual license would allow for more widespread adoption of the technology behind Gobe and partly fund development of the OSS version.
OOo has Star Office
Mozilla has a non-GLP license that allows gecko to be imbedded in various closed source apps (plus Netscape & AOL)
Trolltech has an inexpensive commercial license for QT that allows use with commercial closed source apps.
GPL is good, but only GPL is limiting.
Bruce does say in his interview last Monday that GP3 will be dual Licensed indeed.
So Bill Gates get’s his way again. When will people realize that GPL is of no threat and that MIT is. GPL is just cloning and cloning, and now we will soon see this marvellous code base get ruined by the GPL virus community.
bsharitt: With the OpenOffice.org port to OS X, and now this, who cares if Microsoft leaves the Mac platform and takes Office with it.
A lot of people. Until both office suites/apps have ALL Office’s features, and even more, well, maybe I would support them.
Jim: I agree, once that happens and the “alternatives” standardize on a non .doc file format, it might just end the MS Office monopoly.
This might work is the rest formed a 50% or 40% minority in the market. But they form a 5% minority!!! And besides, legally, MS Office isn’t a monopoly. It is the dominant player and the de facto standard, but not a monopoly.
Anonymous: I had wondered before why they didn’t do a Macintosh version. After all, when they announced the Windows port, MS Office for macintosh sucked (this was pre Office X).
Really? I thought Office 2001 was a much better buy. It was faster, and have most of the features of Office v. X.
Beee: So Bill Gates get’s his way again. When will people realize that GPL is of no threat and that MIT is. GPL is just cloning and cloning, and now we will soon see this marvellous code base get ruined by the GPL virus community.
You don’t have to use GPL to clone. And you don’t have to clone to use GPL. You are making this conclusion based on a lot of GPPL software, but there are some innovative GPLed software, like GCC for example. MIT license on the other hand also allows cloning (see XFree86), but wouldn’t be suitable for FreeRadical’s business plan. Besides, whether they would be cloning or innovating will be in Gobe’s hands, not GPL.
Innovation comes from the author, not the license. Besides, if Bill Gates got his way, there wouldn’t be GPLed software out there.
GCC? Innovative? it’s just another compiler.
Beee: GPL is good for at least Linux. An example of this will be seen when some of the Lindows like vendors go to market with their multi million dollar modified Linux distros running GCC 2.x and KDE 2.x and get crushed by the mainstream standards based heavy hitters running GCC 3, KDE 3, Gnome 2, etc. Those companies simply don’t have the resources necessary to keep up. Linux and versions of it will continue to evolve because it does not need to claim a profit or hold a dominant position in the market to go on. MS on the other hand, will be in serious hot water when and if ever it is out done. Because of this factor, the OS war is one that MS will eventually lose. After the next vendor product cycle, I see Linux gaining some ground in the desktop market, maybe then we will get some of the needed corporate backing and this will start to get interesting.
rajan r: The reason for the other standard is so OOo users can exchange files with people using Koffice and Gobe. .doc support is sort of a best effort guess and an alternative format is sort of a necessary step in having an option other than MS office.
considering that there is already MS office and open office available, who cares?
> GCC? Innovative? it’s just another compiler.
1) It bootstraps itself from almost nothing. That is it doesn’t require a compiler to be built.
2) It does this on dozens of platforms.
3) It supports something like 20 languages
4) Its now the quasi-official compiler of several totally different OSes.
Lots of Forth based compilers do (1).
I don’t know of any compiler with this many platforms so on (2) its untouched.
Microsoft-C is probably the only compiler that comes close to same amount of language support with regards to (3).
GEM perhaps is the only compiler that anything like (4) was true for.
There is no real deal OpenOffice for OSX. It is available only through an X11 server currently, that is sucky. And OOO is so much bigger that it would take more time porting it, than porting GP3.
1. No auto-vectorizer for modern CPUs.
2. No codegen after the linker, to allow for global optimization/inlining.
3. No features like recompiling part of an app while it’s running
4. No incremental linking.
Intel/MSC++ supports all that, plus they produce faster code… GCC is a good free product. But it is not the best when compared to the Intel C/C++ compiler, for x86, which is what 99% of the people are mostly interested in.
rajan r: The reason for the other standard is so OOo users can exchange files with people using Koffice and Gobe. .doc support is sort of a best effort guess and an alternative format is sort of a necessary step in having an option other than MS office.
True, I agree, but I doubt this would kill Microsoft in the first place.
I think that was gobe is doing here is very cool. I really wish Be, inc. had done the same. After all, “palm only purchased the company for the engineers” so why shelve and kill off Beos. Gobe is the anthesis of be, inc. and that is a good thing.
I recall a comment on a BeNews forum from one of the Gobe programmers along the lines of “if it’s up to me, the Mac port of Productive will be done after the Commodore 64 port.” There was a clear suggestion of hard feelings, perhaps relating to Apple’s re-absorption of Claris.
As for GCC, I’d suggest that ‘innovative’ and ‘best’ aren’t always identical. Eugenia’s true comments don’t make jbolden1517’s comments false. This is maybe a particularly relevant observation in a thread about Productive–taken on their own, none of their components are better than Microsoft Office’s components in terms of feature-completeness and functionality. Yet, its approach to office software integration is substantially more innovative and lets it do some things Office can’t. Likewise, no matter how good Microsoft’s compilers are, they won’t do you much good–even on an Intel machine, even running Windows–if you’re trying to cross-compile, or trying to compile anything but C or C++.
This does remind of a tidbit from Dr. Dobbs’ Journal long ago, though, shortly after IBM released OS/2 3.0. It was observed that Windows programs ran substantially faster in it than they did in version 2.0. When a DDJ columnist asked someone at IBM how they achieved that, the response was, “We switched from using the Microsoft C compiler to the Watcom C compiler.”
At first I thought the idea of Gobe for Mac didn’t make any sense (well, it didn’t until now) because of its similarities to AppleWorks. Now though, things are different. People who have never used Gobe don’t understand how fabulous it is. I know, on the surface, one might think office suites are pretty much the same, but Gobe is entirely different in the way it allows you to work with documents. In fact, as far as I know, it is utterly unique.
You know, Claris was working on an OpenDoc version of Clarisworks – I used to have it, dammit, but I lost it somehow. Anyway, I think those guys that started Gobe…what they did was, I think, going to be what ClarisWorks for OpenDoc was supposed to be. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were angry – both OpenDoc and Claris got “Steve’d”.
Its funny; I’m now hearing Stallmanites talk about how great GP is. A while back, whenever somebody (a BeOS user) would post about how fast/clean etc. GP was, the Stallmanites were all screaming that OpenOffice/KOffice was sooo much better (yeah, right – – they suck in comparison IMNSHO). Oh, well thats life.
On another note . . . forget OS X for a minute; what about a port to OS 9? MS Office and/or Apple Works for 9 will not be getting any more support/updates and there are a LOT of Mac users clinging onto OS 9. After all, since GP is now “Free”; the MORE users of Stallmanite software the less grip MS has. And currently the OS 9 userbase is probably larger than X?
Part of the problem for any contender to MSOffice’s dominance of the market is the relative reluctance to upgrade of Microsoft’s best clients, the business sector. There are many, many businesses still running WfW as a client OS with Office 4, let alone all the later versions. The .doc and .xls format will be here for a long time yet. Why do you think MS has built in backward read/write filters for Word6 documents even in Office XP?
Businesses do not need the latest CPUs, graphic cards or hard disk space. They upgrade servers when needed. The workstations only need to be able to perform modest tasks relatively speaking. No company is going to throw a lot of cash into upgrading its hardware or software if it is not going to have any appreciable effect on productivity.
The latter point also explains the reluctance of most Mac users to move completely over to OSX. At the end of the day can you get your work done more quickly? If not, then it is only so much eye candy.
Disclosure: I have never used Gobe Productive
GP may well be easier to port to OSX than Star/OpenOffice but there is one crucial flaw, which perhaps will matter far more to the Business World , but also to the newby Home User.
OpenOffice LOOKS Like MS Office in that it has separate distinct applications to do different tasks, and those applications conform to what people expect a spreadsheet or Wordprocessor to appear like.
I understand Productive has an appearance like StarOffice 2.2 where all tasks are handled in a single interface.
Without passing judgement on the usability value, this is not what Business users are looking for, and the failure of Non-MS solutions to make it in a big way on the corporate desktop says as much as we need to know about the conservatism of Corporate IT managers.
So – Good luck to anyone who can get Gobe running well on OSX – but I hope it will not be at the expense of the failure of the OpenOffice Quartz build.
Should read Staroffice 5.2
Seedy, StarOffice 5.2 wasn’t integrated as GP. It was one many components coonected to a Windows 95 UI (Integrated Desktop), and its UI was the cause of its ridicule. Not because it wasn’t like Office (5.2 seperated the tasks like Office did) but rather how stupid the UI is (why have an UI of an OS on a application?). Plus, Integrated Desktop was mostly responsible for the speed woes.
tom6789, I see not Stallmanites here that previous say Gobe suck and now say it rules. Many of them like the idea of GP being GPLed, though. I use KOffice because it is lite and does little things I do often. I use OpenOffice.org when I’m lazy to reboot. I use Office when I’m doing something important. I wanted to try Gobe Productive, but since the demo doesn’t allow saving – I can’t use it for real life uses, and can’t tell how great it is.
Plus, Integrated Desktop was mostly responsible for the speed woes.
I first got to know Star Office at version 3.0, pre-Linux days when it only ran on Windows and OS/2. It did not have the all-in-one interface, but ran as separate apps. It was very slow even then.
I’m not overly hopeful about Open Office for OSX. The program is slow, the OS is slow. As it stands this does not make for a productive working experience.
Okay, maybe Intergrated Desktop isn’t responsible for the speed woes.
Yes, the speed clearly is an issue. I used SO5.2 on Windows 98 and Mandrake 8.0 for a while,and wasn’t impressed. – In fact on Linux I preferred the KDE KOffice components ( I think MDK8 had KDE 2.1 – few features but a very polished interface and good speed as I recall it )
I am currently running 2000 and XP with MS Office 2000 SP1 and OOo 1.0 installed, and must admit a preference for Office for everyday work. My machine ( Athlon T-Bird 1000/640Mb SDRAM ) just can’t start and run OOo at the rate that O2K can.
I have great hopes for OOo.. it is a good looking set of applications and has matured greatly since I trialled the build 638 version, and the SO6 beta, but as with any 1.0 release there are significant improvements to be made.
Good luck and best wishes to GP and OOo developers.
BTW is there still a free trial of GP for Windows? If so I should like to try it
Productive’s a lot faster than StarOffice.
The integrated interface is (not surprisingly) closer to AppleWorks in feel, not SO. In practice it feels a lot more like Microsoft Office with the object linking and embedding working quickly and painlessly, rather than somewhat ponderously.
Its biggest problem, I’d say, is really the one facing all “lite” applications–no matter how you many bases you think you have covered, you’re going to leave out One Crucial Thing that’s important to many users, all of whom will have a different One Crucial Thing. For me, GP 2.0 became usable where GP 1.0 wasn’t because of one little, stupid thing: the ability to say the first page was the “title page” and shouldn’t have the headers and footers on it. That meant there was no way to prepare a properly-formatted story manuscript with GP 1. But GP 2 still didn’t allow sections, which means that it can’t prepare a properly-formatted novel manuscript–GP 3 fixes that.
Now, for a lot of people, “title page” is not going to be the first, second or tenth thing that comes to mind as a Vital Feature for a word processor… but in practice, it can be make-or-break.
The biggest problem GP 3 has, IMHO, is that it’s not scriptable or extensible. If programmability was added to it in some fashion, a lot of those remaining “One Critical Features” could be added easily by users.
> Its biggest problem, I’d say, is really the one facing all “lite” applications–no matter how you many bases you think you have covered, you’re going to leave out One Crucial Thing that’s important to many users, all of whom will have a different One Crucial Thing.
Here we see one big advantage of free software though. Many people will write patches if they need a certain feature of something is often requested by users, so after a while it will cover _a lot_. This will be most important to large companies of course which can simply pay someone to do those changes or additions. Nothing is impossible anymore.
“The biggest problem GP 3 has, IMHO, is that it’s not scriptable or extensible.”
It will be extensible, you get the sourcecode.
But scripting and automatisation is indeed important. This is what impressed me most when working with Office for a year. You can basically automate everything. My boss had really crazy ideas, for example a very special Access form to access the patients database with thousands of special wishes and functions. Like a button which opened word in the background, created a data source (formatted textfile) with the patient data and then opened a word documented that read this data source to create a dynamic report and print it out. While many of this was a pain to do, Office crashed quite a bit when pressing it too it’s limits and the usability was horrible, including several logical flaws, the fact remains that just about _everything_ he wanted was possible. And that was only Office 97.
Since then I have a lot of respect for MS Office. “Lightweight” offices like GP or AbiWord seem to be more targeted at single users to create documents so it doesn’t matter much, but for companies dealing with a LOT of data and many employees, things are different. And I guess that’s why MS Office was such a big money cow as companies are those who pay most.
word up
1. No auto-vectorizer for modern CPUs.
2. No codegen after the linker, to allow for global optimization/inlining.
3. No features like recompiling part of an app while it’s running
4. No incremental linking.
Intel/MSC++ supports all that, plus they produce faster code… GCC is a good free product. But it is not the best when compared to the Intel C/C++ compiler, for x86, which is what 99% of the people are mostly interested in.
There is no question that GCC is not the best C compiler for the x86 platform, among the major options it might very well be the worst. The question was how GCC is innovative not well it performs on the most common language on the most common platform. But it should be understood that where GCC is innovative is its support for obscure languages on obscure platforms. For an application designed to run solely on x86 hardware, especially under Windows there is no reason to choose GCC. To get a 20 different language compilers up and running in a week on a brand new chip there is no reason to choose anything else.
Since then I have a lot of respect for MS Office. “Lightweight” offices like GP or AbiWord seem to be more targeted at single users to create documents so it doesn’t matter much, but for companies dealing with a LOT of data and many employees, things are different. And I guess that’s why MS Office was such a big money cow as companies are those who pay most.
I fully agree. Businesses have very different requirements, and GP/AbiWord are somewhat “light” in comparison. Just because many users never use the more advanced features in Office and mainly just type letters, doesn’t make these features “bloat”. With some of these features, you can’t see the real usefulness of them until you start using them or need them. Yes, OpenOffice is slow (but a good deal faster than StarOffice 5.2), and has a fair share of problems, but as far as I know it’s the one that most approaches MSOffice in terms of features, and the one that has the most potential for acceptance in a business environment. (Of course, even though it can connect to databases, it doesn’t have anything like Access.)
The scriptability of MS Office allows you to do pretty amazing things – in fact most of it’s functionality is far beyond what you get “out of the box” (without using VB). I agree that this is a very big reason why MSOffice is so used and why GP and AbiWord could never be a really viable substitute for MSOffice. Although GP is very elegant,innovative, and fast, it still does not have the features that businesses would looking for.
Now, can’t an application only convert a different file format well if it has a set of feature that is comparable to the foreign file format? Doesn’t this mean that the more feature-alike an office suite is to MSOffice, the better it can convert MSOffice files? Sounds like the very different approach that GP3 takes, and the different feature set, would be a major limitation in it’s ability to convert these files. That’s the advantage that I see with OpenOffice. (not that MS file format compatibility is the end-all of an office suite, but these days it might as well be).
After visiting Gobe’s web site, it would seem that the software is still for sale despite the recent news. Is it still available for purchase or will the GPL version be released in the near future?
Ramaja1986:
<snip>
> This might work is the rest formed a 50% or 40% minority
> in the market. But they form a 5% minority!!! And
> besides, legally, MS Office isn’t a monopoly. It is the
> dominant player and the de facto standard, but not a
> monopoly.
*** EXCUSE ME *** Ramaja1986, but Microsoft (including MS Office) has been legally and officially certified as a monopoly by the U.S. Federal Court. And, this ruling was upheld by the U.S. Federal Appeals Court in an 8 to 0 vote. The fact that Microsoft doesn’t have exactly 100% marketshare isn’t relevant – they’re close enough that it doesn’t matter, practically AND legally. And monopolies are always bad news for customers.
This legal certification is why all of those civil lawsuits have been filed recently.
Even more significantly, Microsoft has been found guilty of illegally maintaining their monopoly, i.e. are a convicted lawbreaker. All that is up in the air in the courts right now currently is the penalty – hopefully the court(s) will deal aggressively with their proceeds from crime.
Hopefully, also, people will stop buying goods from this particular felon where reasonable alternatives exist (I know the situation is less than ideal on the Mac at this instant, the price of a monopoly), and in so doing get decent pricing, a basic consideration of security, responsive functional deficiency repair, some semblance of truthfullness in corporate public statements etc. etc. To say nothing of encourage competition.
Ramaja1986, but Microsoft (including MS Office) has been legally and officially certified as a monopoly by the U.S. Federal Court. And, this ruling was upheld by the U.S. Federal Appeals Court in an 8 to 0 vote.
remaja1986 is my Yahoo! nick, call me Rajan, my *real* name.
MS Windows is certified as a MONOPOLY in the US Federal Court. This is after they have considered the Mac as not a competitor.
Meaning:
Pronunciation: m&-‘nä-p(&-)lE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -lies
Etymology: Latin monopolium, from Greek monopOlion, from mon- + pOlein to sell
Date: 1534
1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 : exclusive possession or control
3 : a commodity controlled by one party
4 : one that has a monopoly
None of the four apply to MS Office. Office doesn’t have legal privilegde. MS Office doesn’t have exclusive possession or control on the market (for example, legal firms uses WordPerfect documents). It isn’t a commodity. And MS Office isn’t a monopoly.
You are confusing Windows with MS Office.
Even more significantly, Microsoft has been found guilty of illegally maintaining their monopoly
Again, this got to do with Windows, not Office. Besides, Microsoft had been found illegally maintaining their “monopoly” after Apple was not considered a competitor to Windows by Jackson.
Hopefully, also, people will stop buying goods from this particular felon where reasonable alternatives exist
So if a lady is convicted to do a crime by Taliban’s court, you aren’t suppose to buy anything from her? I don’t believe in anti trust laws. I think it is a double standard law. If the competitors are soooo good, name me one, just one office suite that has all the features Office has and have even more.
I’m sure you can’t find one. The fault lies on the competitor. A monopoly is that when you buy a PC, you must get Windows because it is a commodity. But lately, a lot of people have been buying Linux with PCs. If Office was a monopoly, people are forced to buy Office – yet more and more firms and goverment agencies are shifting to StarOffice.
Solaris is a monopoly for example. If you buy a Sparc-based computer, it would come with Solaris.
Rajan r,
I think that your comment about “If the competitors are soooo good, name me one, just one office suite that has all the features Office has and have even more.” is true now. However, this was not always the case and it actually makes the point of why MS is a “bad” monopoly (there can be good monopolies).
Back in the day there were plenty of office suites, the worst of which was MSWord/Excel/etc. Most rational people knew that WordPerfect was a better word processor than Word, that Lotus was better than Excel (this one is debatable..), and that Access was a piece of junk (which it still is).
However, special OEM deals, bundling with the OS, hidden API calls, aggressive use of file formats, and other (and more dangerously brutal) tactics were used to raze the once-healthy office productivity environment, killing off pretty much anyone who even tried to get in, if nothing else because MS had you by the throat with their file formats, and if you wanted to be compatible you most likely spent most of your time making compatibility filters instead of real features. We see the same thing happening now, where most of the problems with OOO is with MS Office compatibility, not with making a good suite of features.
I think it is pretty obvious that MS Office and Windows are pretty closely-tied monopoly-making software. Windows reinforced Office and vice-versa, making MS the 800 lb. Mean, nasty gorilla that it is. I think that people are OK with big gorillas if they act responsibly and do the Right Thing. However, the problem is that MS has consistently destroyed whole markets with their tactics (They have also created whole markets with their “standardization”, too, but that is another story).
Cool… I want… 😉