[link|http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1520|GobeProductive going GPL]

GobeProductive is a slick little office suite written by the team that wrote ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) for the Mac. It started as BeOS only, but the latest version was ported to Windows and a Linux version is in Alpha I believe. I guess they couldn't make a go of it (closed source)commerically so they are opening it up and restructuring thier business around the codebase.

I've played with the BeOS version in the past. Some highlights:

- Small, lightweight. Don't know how well this carried over to the more cross-platform version.

- Its another choice in office suites that run on both Windows and Linux.

- Integration between the apps was good. You could embed a spreadsheet in a WP doc and make it translucent/transparent and/or rotate it arbitrarily. That's a trick I've never seen OLE embedding do (not that I ever find the need to embed much of anything in MS Office, and I use it everyday). Actually, now that I recall, the concept is that you have a blank sheet of paper and you put whatever you need in your document; words, spreadsheet, chart, drawing. Sound alot like what OpenDoc was supposed to bring.

It'll be interesting to watch this one.