As previously reported, over $10,000 dollars has been pledged to open source Gobe Productive. Today Beunited.org has announced that conversations with Gobe have begun. Beunited.org thanked everyone for their donations and requested that the community be patient while the disscussions are going on.
“From this great community response beunited.org has engaged Gobe management and are now progressing with talks to discuss the possible avenues that can be worked out to make the source code available. We ask that the public please be patient as discussions continue.”
“We graciously encourage everyone who has pledged a donation to contact everyone they know and spread the news. The more support the community gives, the more the possibility of releasing the source becomes. It’s up to the community to make this a reality. Please tell a friend and make it happen.”
You can still pledge money here.
What is Gobe? What is this going to do.
I’ve also been thinking, anybody bought a walmart lindows pc and put BeOS on it?
>What is Gobe?
Make a search on osnews…
The cheap Walmart PCs are based on VIA chipsets and BeOS 5 doesn’t support these chipsets well. BeOS on these PCs wouldn’t work well, or it would need patches and it would have no support.
I really hope that BeUnited will deliver OpenOffice for BeOS.. I use it almost 90% of my Windows time.
Gobe would be nice.. But OpenOffice would be better.
So start your compilers and start to port OpenOffice
/Konrad
That is what I would like to see!
sory .. only dreaming
I must disagree..Gobe productive is an office suite done “the BeOS way”. I think a port of OpenOffice for BeOS is important as well – with it comes the possibility of coorporate adoption and a simpler transition from Microsoft products.
However to stay true to the BeOS roots, I think that a native, powerful office suite is of great importance. Hopefully we can have both on BeOS – but if it came down to one or the other, my vote would be for Gobe Productive.
That’s what Be Inc. had to do back in r4 days. No that “Media OS” crap.
We need another open source office suite. KOffice is too tightly wrapped into KDE, open office could be a helluva a lot better, Gobe is polished but needs more features… open sourcing Gobe would push the notch of professionalism on our open source software up another level.
Go beunited!
i love koffice…just wish it had better filters for MS formats, and full support for the OO formats. the integration into kde is one of things that i like, makes it fast to start and so consistent looking to the rest of kde.
Could have worked. Maybe it could still work.
In fact, could anyone try to install BeOS on one of these WalMart PCs, just for the heck of it?
Eugenia, I just noticed that ALL my motherboards at home are VIA based! And all the computers with these mobo’s have BeOS installed, which works perfectly on them! Can you believe it? And when I say perfectly, I mean it: no glitch, no stability problem, nada, nema nishta. On one of these computers Win95 OSR2 craps out quite often, but not BeOS, interesting, huh?
Mario,
Eugenia: some VIA based machines work well with BeOS (mine is a good example).
Mario: perhaps one of the latest distributions (MAX or Developer edition) makes unnecessary patching for the different CPUs (AMD and P4). It may be worth a try.
Koki
I have a mini-itx motherboard, the EPIA 800 or something. Instructions on getting it working properly are on frizbe.net.
Why don’t Gobe bite the bullet and go for an Apple/Sun style open source/development model. That way they’d be able to build a competitive product and make money. Selling the source for it to acquire an GNU style license seems like throwing an opportunity away.
It will be interesting to see how many cents on the dollar those “pledges” will actually materialize.
>>>Why don’t Gobe bite the bullet and go for an Apple/Sun style open source/development model. That way they’d be able to build a competitive product and make money.
Because they got creditors and shareholders to deal with. Also all the employees (including Tom and Scott) have found jobs elsewhere — who’s going to work on it.
Also interesting is that beunited is the only ones saying that they are in talks with gobe. History has taught us that all this could mean is that Simon sent an email to gobe and that’s all. Gobe could have just dismissed it outright and not even spent the time to reply the email.
What happened to OpenTracker ? Does anyone know ?
Sam,
Try to be a little more optimistic about things… and perhaps constructive comments would be better than trying to slander people and projects by implying dishonesty.
As for your historical account, I agree, that was the pattern of beunited in the past, before I became president. As for talks with Gobe this time I can assure you that they are answering my email and we are talking. It’s not just one way. There is no guarantee that any of this will work out, so please be patient.
I just wanted to defend the honor of my fellow BeUnited members at the time of the Be IP sale to Palm. Through no fault of ours (the members of BU at the time) did the “talks with Palm” end up as vapor. Initially, Palm responded to our inquiry politely and with interest in continuing discussions. We got a response from the then CEO of Palm (I may mean Palm Source, I cannot recall). It was only after the change in management at Palm that those talks evaporated, dried up, went kaput.
We tried (many of us) to keep the dialog going, asking all the important questions (ie: how much money, what kind of marketing, what kinds of licenses and deals, etc), but it was without result. It seems, the new executives at Palm already had their minds made up. It took quite a lot of “pestering” for Palm to even give out the politically correct “you’re not getting anything from us, so quit bothering us” letter that they sent some time later.
Please do not blame BeUnited for the unhappy end to that situation. In my personal opinion, BU was not treated fairly by Palm. Maybe we were just small fish or something. Geek kids with no money, or whatever other unfair moniker the business suites had in their heads. You might say that this is just how it goes with the hard and cold equations of the business world, but I personally feel that Palm missed an opportunity and also did harm to the computer industry with their choices in this area. Keep in mind, this is my own personal opinion. BU in no way endorses my comments here.
As for Zeta… I know nothing. I have my own opinion here as well, but I will not voice it at this time. I agree with Simon: be positive, constructive and objective. If you’re cautious, that’s fine too. 😉
I don’t understand, Koki. Why are you telling this to me? Worth a try?
How do they do that? I mean, they don’t have the source for the BeOS kernel, so how then?
Or do they..??
Patching the kernel does not require source code. I think it’s just a matter of interception of certain calls here and there that you observe with data analysis and then modifying the binary and distributing the modified version (or the tool to modify it). This isn’t my area, but I thought I’d mention there is no source code involved in this.
Opentracker is very much alive, altough Axel who is the lead of the OT, is working day and night on OpenBeOS kernel.
They moved OpenTracker to SourceForge.. so check there.
I think developers are welcome! So join!
/Konrad