[haiku] Re: What happened to GOBE?
- From: Kenneth Rivera <kervas@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 20:29:06 -0600
2010/5/15 Kevin Ar18 <kevinar18@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> The last bit of info I can find is from 2008.
> There is an OSnews article from 2008, a Blue Lotus article from 2008, and
> the gobe.com website is stuck on 2008.
>
> Does anyone have newer info?
>
Newer info?
There's GoBe Productive Office and Creative Suite 2008, at www.gobe.in
Screenshot here [ http://gobe.in/images/wordprocessing.jpg ], it seems to be
pretty much the same one that's we've had for years.
Here's a recap of some of GoBe's history.
After Be Inc. choked themselves to deah, GoBe briefly published Chorum III
for BeOS. They then ported GoBe Productive to Windows, and released a beta
for Linux.
There was never a final release for Linux, but there was one for Windows,
which has been for sale since about 2002, and only a few of us have bought
it.
In 2002, there was an initiative to try to open source GoBe Productive[1],
but it failed.
Also at the end of 2002, there was also an attempt to buy out the software
fro GoBe to, again, open source it[2], on one hand for BeOS, but also for
Linux, but this also failed [3][4].
Several attempts have been done to have alternatives to GoBe Productive. In
late 2005 Zeta developers tried to get OpenOffice working for the BeOS again
[6]. They did not go far, though, mostly after deciphering the daunting
dependency tree for OpenOffice. There was a famous hand-drawn picture shown
around back then, but I cannot seem to find it. This is the current one [7].
The most successful attempt for an alternative has been with AbiWord,
unfortunately it has been stuck at a very early version (pre 1.0), even
earlier than the one available for Mac OS X.
Apparently some russian guy got to compile a more recent version around
2005, but it was hard to come by [5].
In 2007, as Magnussoft released the last version ever of Zeta, 1.5, they
included a more up-to-date version of AbiWord (for that time).
In early 2008, rumors spread that GoBe had the intention to buy BeOS out
from Asian company Access (Access had bought BeOS from Palm previously).
GoBe's CEO, Bruce Hammond, said those rumours were not true.[8]
What did happen, is that GoBe Productive for Windows would now be
distributed by Blue Lotus Group (BLG), a company from India.
This much is also what has been displaying for the last 2 years on the
gobe.com website.
The main website is now www.gobe.in
The software trial for Windows is still available at
[ http://www.gobe.com/Trial/gobeProductive_Trial.msi ], if you want to try
it out.
GoBe Productive for the BeOS has been dead since 2.0. You can still buy it
at Purplus, by the way [9].
Besides that, we now have, well, this:
Google Docs [ http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/docs.html ]
Cheers,
- Kit
---
[1] [ http://www.osnews.com/story/1520 ]
Further comments here [
http://www.osnews.com/comments/1520&offset=15&rows=30#30208 ]
[2] beunited.org Donation Pledge Reaches $10,000.00
http://www.osnews.com/story/2331/beunited_org_Donation_Pledge_Reaches_10_000_00
[3] BeUnited Archived Donation Drive [
http://web.archive.org/web/20030308091701/www.beunited.org/standards/phorum/read.php?f=22&i=219&t=4]
[4] http://www.osnews.com/story/2308
[5] The russian version was here last I knew [
http://www.qube.ru/forums/item/developer/message/18102/ ]
[6] OpenOffice for Zeta [ http://www.osnews.com/comments/12680 ]
[7] OpenOffice dependency tree [
http://tools.openoffice.org/project_dependencies.png ]
[8] GoBE Software's CEO Clarifies [
http://www.osnews.com/story/19202/GoBE_Software_s_CEO_Clarifies ]
[9] GoBe Productive for sale here [
http://store.purplus.net/gopr20forbe.html ]
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