Sorry if this obvious or answered before. I searched the web, HaikuDepot and this forum. But still I don’t know: Is there an open source GoBe office suite for Haiku?
No.
Should be quite easy to find all over the forum. This has been discussed several times in the past.
A quick search on the forum gets plenty of results, including these ones:
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As much as I would like to buy and upgrade it to capabilities that we generally expect from productivity suite today, I do not believe the effort should be undertaken.
The code base is probably a very big mess, from what I have previously read about other contempory software projects. Even it is very clean and corporate knowledge notes and comments were there, what kind of time it would take to piecemeal it in work projects and deliver something close to Office 2025? That is assuming all the code is C++.
Not achievable…better off waiting for some capitalist willing to fund the software and also invest into the Haiku project so that we have many more programmers working on what we love. Yeah…I know it is a nice dream, but it is a nice one to have. 
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The problem is that the old BeOS-specific code is entirely lost,even the original developers don’t have it anymore.
If the code was there,I’m sure there would be people modernizing it,like it happened with many other apps originating from BeOS.
Yes,it would be a lot of work,but a native office suite would be a huge thing for Haiku.
I’d happily contribute if that was possible.
Anyway,it’s not going to happen unfortunately,there have been so many talks about it already without results.
Well, for a Haiku native office suite, at least one could improve on the existing office native apps.
Which is, well, mostly Sum-It.
Which will welcome any coder love for sure:
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/sum_it/haikuports/haikuports_x86_64/0/2beta/-/-/8/x86_64
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If Office applications are written the Haiku/BeOS way, they don’t have to be a “Suite”. Message passing between applications is what we do best. We basically need a well written native word processor. We have spreadsheets, graphics and we essentially ARE a database 
Gobe Productive 2.0.1 - I use a copy with Haiku which works somewhat. Source code - well you may have a restrictive software license even if obtained.
Someone could look at the best modern open-source office apps and work from that swimming pool for nativity reasons….
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The licencing issue, I’m fairly sure, is that it includes code that Gobe licenced in.
For example, even in the late 90s, there was no good open spellchecker that you could use in an application, and even Microsoft licenced in a third party spellcheck as it was still seen as quite complicated software engineering. I think Gobe has a licenced in spellcheck. It may have had other licenced in software.
As an aside - there was actually an attempt at providing a “buy once, use many” system-wide spellcheck daemon for BeOS by some company at the time, an interesting idea that could have probably been replaced by hunspell or even used/become like Enchant where the spell check engine is pluggable. Basically applications worked without spellcheck unless this software was present, the user paid for it not the software developer.
As another aside, licenced in code is why ACCESS are never going to just go “OK, here’s the BeOS source code”. Be licenced in code for media codecs, drivers, the font renderer, much of the MIDI kit, used the commercial RSA SSL engine in Net+ in R5 and so on - all that would need to be stripped out carefully and replaced to provide something buildable, which could not be done by anyone other than ACCESS and would cost far too much money for zero benefit to anyone at this point - the R5 sourcecode would not be of any benefit to Haiku at this point or probably any point in the last 20 years.
Stripped out, yes. Replaced, not necessarily. If ACCESS had been interested in opening BeOS source code they could have provided just the parts they own, omitting the licensed modules and libs. The resulting code would be non-buildable, but I don’t think anyone would be particularly concerned about that. Nowadays it’s more of a historical interest than a practical application.
But even if it’s just the removal of the licensed modules your point about the costs still stands. In the post GoBe Productive on Haiku - #99 by Stacked_Lambda there’s an info on how much GoBe asked for cleaning up the source code and releasing it into the open source world, it was around $200’000
200k to just strip out licenced stuff might be a bit high, but 200k to remove it all and restore the code base to being buildable on BeOS (let alone modernised for Haiku) would very easily be a very low estimate. We know they no longer have a copy of BeOS-buildable 2.0 code, it’s just the 3.0 Windows/Linux with a Be API wrapper stuff.
I say a bit high - if someone said 100k I’d believe it entirely. You need someone with lots of strong, expensive skills to work for a number of months; and the owners of the Gobe code are a US firm where those skills are probably at their dearest.
Sorry, but I don’t have anything that you want. However, my wife and I are having work done on our house and because of that I’ve had to clean up a lot of stuff in my computer/music room and I found a laptop with BeOS 5.0 Pro installed on it but it was just the OS with nothing else.
But then I found my GoBe Productive 2.01 for BeOS and GoBe Productive 3.0 for Windows (sorry but they used Windows at work though I only used Macs AFTER 1998 but before that I was mainly IBM OS/2 but looked at a couple dozen different linux distros including Corel Linux with Corel WordPerfect which wasn’t anything like the WordPerfect for DOS or Windows and really sucked. It was basically the UNIX version of WordPerfect which nobody apparently loved because it was horrible.
I also found my OS/2 Warp disks and eComStation disks (OS/2 licensed to Indelible Blue to keep drivers working on newer hardware which is now done by Arca Noae so OS/2 lives).
I retired a couple years ago and I don’t have to use #$*(&#$(& Windows ever again and I’m going back to getting PCs with alternate OSs like OS/2 and Haiku.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of pain from diabetes and the effects of that and from the meds I need to take, have dulled my programming skills a lot, but I’m trying to start trying to do a small amount of programming in OS/2 and Haiku. While I worked on VERY large projects during my 40 year programming career, I’m not able to work on anything too complicated because of what I’ve already mentioned. So anything I do will likely just be for fun and to try to keep my brain to going totally to mush.
I’m excited to get back to the OSs that I loved (OS/2 mainly but I love BeOS for the promises that it had based on the BeOS Demo video (if you haven’t watched it you SHOULD). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ
Anyway, I was excited to find these CDs.
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It should be possible to decompile GoBe Productive and recreate the source code. Would the rights holders of GoBe Productive be opposed to this?
That sounds like an incredible amount of work to me.
Probably, yes, if they are even aware that they own the rights.
Perhaps the time has come to let go and move on to the next stage of grief. It has been thirty years, after all. Meanwhile, there are QT wordprocessors and spreadsheets and databases waiting patiently in the Github app shelter for someone to adopt them.
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I don’t like being confrontational, so I hope nobody takes this that way. It’s just my thoughts.
A bit of background on me: I was a BeOS user. BeOS was my main operating system and I used it for everything except games, which I relied on Windows for (except the few that were available such as Call To Power). Firefox (or whatever it was called at the time, Opera, Productive… I used them and didn’t have any trouble with my day-to-day computing.
So, now I kind of use Haiku. It’s not close to being a daily driver, but I do my odd writing from time to time with LibreOffice and keep an eye on some web things with WebPositive. I don’t, and can’t, do as much as I’d like to, though.
Having Qt and GTK programs is… nice. Kind of. I’m not thrilled with the all the extra libraries that come along with either. But the programs sort of work. LibreOffice better than most, in that copy & paste works and it doesn’t always crash. I mean, it does crash, just not as often as other things. Like IceWeasel and LibreWolf.
If I had my choice, though, I’d be using programs that used Haiku’s UI and, hopefully, features of the OS. Like, consistent working of copy & paste (I can’t, for instance, copy and paste text from StyledEdit into the address bar of IceWeasel or LibreWolf). And, maybe, not crashing so much. A few minutes ago I right-clicked on the address bar of LibreWolf and it just disappeared. I re-launched it (which takes a while with no indication that anything is happening) and right-clicked in the address bar and it didn’t disappear. Will that ever get fixed? I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve seen it updated since I installed it.
Anyway, the thing I have to ask myself is, “If all applications on Haiku are going to be Qt or GTK apps, why don’t I just drop Haiku and use Linux? Or stick with Windows? Or macOS?” I already use all three of them so it seems kind of senseless to even bother with Haiku. As someone who really does like the OS, it seems kind of painful to feel that way.
In all honesty, I’d rather use thirty year old Productive to write. It’s old, probably buggy, but it seems more authentic. But I’m not willing to install 32-bit Haiku just to do it. I’d love a new Productive, but I know that’s never going to happen. At best, starting something like a GoFundMe to get enough money to hire someone to write a new word processor (at least) would be the only way to get something.
Which would probably lead to people saying, “That’s stupid because we already have LibreOffice! And Calligra! And AbiWord! And WordTsar!”
I keep hoping Haiku will gain more traction among the masses. Every time a discussion comes along about ditching Windows for Linux, I always toss in a Haiku mention. I know that’s not going to fulfill their requirements, but I always hope someone will get curious and latch on to it. Not just for the possibility that more people will work on the OS itself, but become interested in writing programs for it. I seriously tried to pitch Haiku to Atari to use Haiku as their sort-of-official desktop OS for the new VCS, mostly in the hopes they could convince AMD to write drivers for video, audio (only HDMI audio), and Wi-Fi. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen; they used Debian Linux.
Again, it’s not my intention to minimize anything that anyone is doing. I’m grateful for what I have, for the most part. Although, if someone could fix Palapeli so it actually does save the puzzle in progress, that’d be real nifty.
So, there you go. That’s all me. Thanks for attending my TED Talk, like and subscribe, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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