Seems like most things went wrong when Gobe went public announcing that GobeProductive development would reactivated. It also seems like my questions were more or less in place as well. Bruce Q. Hammond is still in charge, and has written an open e-mail to OSNEWS / Community:

“I just saw the Gobe/BeOS story on OSNews.

It is true that Gobe and BLG have a distribution/development deal in India and China, much of the rest of the story is misleading.

GobeProductive is not going to buy BeOS. First of all the developer of the software is Gobe Software, Inc. GobeProductive is the name of the product. Just to make things more confusing, the software was distributed by a company called Gobe Corp for several years. Gobe Software, Inc has reacquired the software and is exploring several paths to further development and distribution. Currently the Gobe.com website still reflects this distribution arrangement with Gobe Corp. That should change soon.

If there is any activity, or purchase of the source code to BeOS it will not be instigated by Gobe Software, Inc. However, what BLG and its partners in India do is another story; I can’t speak for them. I am not going to comment on this further however.

I am not at liberty to discuss any roadmap plans for GP, but there is no plan to do anything with Java in the codebase. GobeProductive is 100% a C++ codebase and will stay that way. We do have a version of the software that runs on Linux, but it was never taking to shipping quality. If we pickup and continue with a Linux team, it will probably be via a port of the code to KDE and that would get us most of the way to a Mac version as well. “

So Gobe is not planning to buy any BeOS code, nor do they plan to do anything in JAVA. Both make perfectly sence. Also trashing the Gnome version makes sence, but as Bruce Hammonds writes it, they should perhaps have their main focus on rewriting GobeProductive with Qt, so that they can have one code base for the versions for Windows, MacOS X and KDE? And for now just make smaller changes and bug fixes for the Windows version.

Well enough said, I am crossing my fingers for GobeProductive. It was was an awesome office solution. For a short roadmap, support for new file formats, ODF, Office 2007 and improvements in support of Office 97-2003 formats, and bug fixes. In later stages collobaration functionality is needed. I will install GobeProductive and follow the development.