Corel To Test WordPerfect For Linux

prostoalex writes "CNET News says Corel will introduce a native Linux version of its WordPerfect Office product on April 15th . This will be a pilot project, as Corel executives want to find out whether it's worth competing with the other products (namely StarOffice and OpenOffice)." The piece mentions: "Corel previously produced a Linux-native version of WordPerfect 8, released in 1998, and offered a Linux-translated version of WordPerfect 9 in 2000, when Linux was still a cornerstone of the company's broader strategy."

To little to late?

[rf0]

Prehaps as Corel see that the Windows market is lost they are trying to made headway back into the Linux market when Open Office is the leader. Will it be back to a world of incompatible filetypes again?

Rus

Too little, too late ? Hopefully not

[Space cowboy]

I remember trying out WordPerfect 8 for Linux back when it was first released, and being shocked at just how awkward it was to use. The port had obviously just been a code-for-code translation from the original WP, and although experienced WP users would probably feel at home, it felt less attractive than writing in LaTeX to me!

I think Corel wants to expand their market share, not just port users across to a new OS; to do that, they need to compete with the others named (Staroffice, Openoffice) and not just turn up. IMHO Corel will have to have put a far nicer UI on top of their product before it'll get accepted by anyone not already a WP nut...

If WP9 was far superior to 8, then I apologise to Corel (and hope 'office does well) but I didn't even try 9 because of how awful 8 was. That's the danger in bringing an externally-developed product into a new marketplace - it needs to sing its own strengths whilst merging into the choir... Hopefully Corel has got it right - more competition can only strengthen all the players.

Simon.

Corel still exists?

[rm -rf /etc/*]

Wow, what's the point of this? OpenOffice has already made strong headway in the linux market, and from what I remember Corel wasn't that great the last time they put it out for linux. Given their dismal market share I doubt there is going to be much of a market on linux...

Re:To little to late?

[jellomizer]

Will it be back to a world of incompatible filetypes again?
It never ended. Just because most people decided on the Word Format it is just as bad as using a WP format and others. They still really haven't came out with a good Open standard for word processing except for richtext.

Welcome Corel!

[Hekatchu]

Definitely worth of competiting, even with OO and Star Office in the field. More competition means more innovation ... competition in Linux market may also boost creativity in other markets more important to Corel at the moment ... you never know until you try.

Native?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that means xlib, qt or gtk?

Re:To little to late? XML means nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that WP files can be read elsewhere because they use XML is like saying one IM program can connect to all others because it uses TCP/IP, or configuration files for one program will work for all other apps because they're plain ASCII.

XML, by itself, is not a format, people!

Yes, but...

[Moth7]

Using XML makes it far easier to write the code that reads the format. If you use an XML format you can't be acc#used of lock-in because if a developer wishes for his app to read your format then all he has to do is hook an xml parser and interpret it. Now take that in comparison with an encrypted binary format...

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[droleary]

What I always found odd was the fact that WP hasn't been ported to the Apple Mac OS X environment.

It's not just odd, it's downright brain-dead from a business perspective. I say it every time I see a game get a Linux port and not a Mac port, too. The Mac desktop market dwarfs Linux the same way that the Windows market dwarfs it. It's easy to see that anyone who can be satisfied with a Linux desktop is also probably satisfied with available free office suites, whereas Mac users don't have the same choices in native versions and are further used to paying for such software. So, what, their master plan is to throw millions at something with a market that is maybe in the tens of thousands? This is just a stupid move, and someone at Corel should almost certainly be fired over it.

Yes, you could...

[Svartalf]

The problem with that is that it's still:

1) A Windows app. It doesn't use ANY special features of Linux/Unix

2) Still slower than GTK+ for many things because it's abstracting the Windows API to the X11 one and has to do many things in an inefficient manner to duplicate Windows behaviors.

Re:Why the animosity? It's a good thing!

[Aneurysm9]

The show codes feature is probably the only good think WP has going for it. It can be a lifesaver a times though. Much of the secretarial staff at the various law offices I've worked at refuse to use anything but WP for precisely that reason.

Re:Give me WP 5.1 for Linux

[gator_linux]

This is being moderated as funny but I think active posters are generally too young to realize what great software WP5.1 is. You had to memorize shortcuts (or use some paper cutouts as reminders) but you learned those quickly and productivity was excellent.

Nobody worried too much about formatting, you were typin content.

Commercially viable?

[gilesjuk]

Given the low cost of Star Office and Open Office is this venture commercially viable? Word Perfect needs to offer a much higher quality product to be good value. Star Office and Open Office use freely available file formats, does Word Perfect? vendor lock-in is something people are trying to avoid by moving away from Microsoft Office.

Re:To little to late?

[gristlebud]

I was a longtime user of Wordperfect, back to the 5.1 for DOS days. It always had better tools for collaboration, and MS Word still dosen't handle parent/daughter documents as well as Wordperfect.

My problem with Wordperfect in general is that they seem to try and actively want to prevent dissemination of their file format. If I recieve a file in .wpd, there are no good filters to open it, and Corel dosent release a free viewer to open it. Invariably, I have to call back to the person who sent me the document, and ask them to export it as .rtf or some other interchanageable format. Compare this to their competition:

MS Word: File format propritary, but generally well understood. MS provides a free Win32 viewer to open view, and print documents.

Lotus Smartsuite: File format less understood, but IBM provides a free Win32 viewer as well.

Openoffice/Staroffice: File format well documented. Anyone can download a complete version of openfoffice to open, view, and edit the documents on a variety of platforms.

If Corel wants to increase adoption of their software, they've _got_ to make their file formats more accessible, so that people will want to buy their software to interact with others.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[Repugnant_Shit]

This is just a guess (I'm not a game developer) but most Linux game ports do NOT work on Linux, they work on x86 Linux. I guess it's much easier to port a game to a different OS on the same architecture than to a different OS on a completely different arch.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[Gildor]

Yes, except 1)The people on the show chose to be there, and 2)They do get fired for reasons - they screw up.

Still a need...

[Chris Tyler]

I used and loved WP on Unix from 5.1 through 8. I still have WP6 and WP8 on one of my Linux boxes to manage the occassional old document.

WP's user interface had clunky spots, but it was *predictable*. StarOffice drives me crazy in a few places-- Getting rid of extra lines at the top of the page sometimes seems impossible, and Good Luck if you have a table at the top of a page and want to insert lines above it.

But WP's most impressive feat was the file compatability. From 5.2 onward, files were forward- AND backward-compatible. The tagged-block structure file format had been thought out well, and as new features were introduced, they were added to the format in such a way that older versions of the app could open and use as much of the newer files as possible. Compared to Word, it stood out as just plain Good Engineering.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[krunk7]

Interesting opinion. However, it's impossible to track the actual number of linux users by virtue that it can be downloaded for free. Even those of us who support our OO distro or software of choice often do so in the form of "donations" and not boxed purchases.

That being said, I have a slight tendancy to trust the opinions of those who have millions of dollars to spend analyzing the market for true potential rather than a slashdotter ranting about his OS of choice, throwing platitudes left and right.

Corel is about making money. If they thought there was a realistic chance of making money with the Mac market, they'd port in a second.

The only thing that will tell is time and if Mac users keep channting to themselves they're "the premium second place guy" one day there going to wake up and realize that they aren't. And that's the real key, Apple still has it's same base of loyal users it's had forever while Linux is growing in leaps and bounds each year. Money is to be made in growing markets not stagnate ones with relative market roles already established.

Wrong product!

[RoLi]

What we would need is Corel-Draw, not WordPerfect.

Corel-Draw would not have much competition on the Linux platform, but WordPerfect will.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[Lxy]

The suffering and misfortune of the powerless is sport now. Televised sport.

The Apprentice is not really a "firing". It's an extended job interview. Donald Trump "firing" people on the show is just sensationalizing it for TV. These people are not actually employed yet, and they know what they're getting into.

Re:Mac Desktop market

[Bastian]

But it's probably worth pointing out that a whole lot of Linux users also have a Windows box sitting around somewhere (or sharing space inside the Linux box.) Mac users tend to only have a Mac.

So there might be a lot of Linux users who just use WP for Windows and more would be using OpenOffice. On the Mac, though, a signifigantly higher percentage of of users are probably screaming for a decent office suite since they don't own PC's, OO.org's OS X port isn't exactly the greatest thing in the world, and AppleWorks is flat-out poop.

The reason why the Mac market hasn't been to strong for games is because Mac gamers do buy PCs for games, and the Mac ports are usually crappy so why bother buying it?

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[RoLi]

The big difference is that the Mac-market gets smaller while the Linux market gets bigger.

China is looking at Linux, not Mac. In Thailand most computers are already preloaded with Linux, not MacOS. Munich is switching to Linux, not MacOS.

Also, just linking an app against winelib is much more cost-effective than having to buy new hardware and port it to some Mac-API.

Re:Parent = Dickhead.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot: Make fun of the moderation system, get modded Offtopic. Admit you know you'll be modded down into oblivion, get moddep up. Admit you know you'll me modded down into oblivion (but being obvious that you know the previous point), and you'll be modded down into oblivion.

Ok, moderators, so I'll spare you the "I know I'll be going to modded down for this" line. However, as I value my karma, I post this as an Anderson Consultant, eeerr ACcenture.

Re:Yes, but...

[The Infamous Grimace]

It's easier to code a program for reading a binary file than an XML file.

How so? I ask this in all seriousness, because I'm developing an inventory application that will use DTDs to describe the inventory format, and store the data in XML format. I'm hoping to use expat [sourceforge.net], an OSS XML parser. However, I'm an amateur, learning as I go, so any advice from those with more experience is always welcomed.

(tig)

WP8 for Linux still beats the competition

[oneeyedman]

There are still plenty of WordPerfect 8 users on Linux who are, like me, sufficiently attached to it to install the old libc and xlib libraries it requires. (It gets harder each time.) There is even an actively maintained support site: Rick Moen's WordPerfect on Linux FAQ [linuxmafia.com]. WP8's printer support is still reasonably good after all these years, and ther is no substitute for the Reveal Codes feature, which is the ultimate in being able to lift the hood and make quick repairs. OO is slow and ugly (just like it has always been), Abiword is feature-poor and quirky (it won't even support printers that ancient WP8 supports, and I don't have any interest in learning why). Serious word processing for non-Word-users is a nightmare of switching around among apps until one does the job. In my work, which includes authoring books, WordPerfect still comes out on top most of the time as the best all-around choice. I will gladly buy an a new Linux-native release. (And we just won't talk about WP9 for Linux....) The only features where WP8 can't match or beat reecent releases of Word is in change-tracking and commenting, where MS dominates completely.

Re:Yes, but...

[zhenlin]

Ahem.

Excerpted from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.itunes.eq.plist:

AAAAAABBAGMAbwB1AHMAdABpAGMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAA

I see a huge chunk of Base64 encoded data. It is an XML file, 90% of which is Base64 data.

It is very, very easy to take a file and put a XML wrapper around it.

#!/bin/bash
echo '<?xml version="1.0"?>
<base64>'
encode-base64 < "$1"
echo '</base64>'

I think they may be too late...

[StressGuy]

Given the success I've been having with OpenOffice lately, I think I'd probably more inclined to try out StarOffice first if I were deploying this for a business.

Too bad....WordPerfect was once my favorite word processor.

Creating Solutions For No Problems

[beforewisdom]

There are plenty of nice word processors for the *nix desktop. The big issue is M$ Word compatibility. The word processes that do it best ( OO, StarOffice ) have big SLOW cloogy interfaces no one likes. A need for any more newword processors for *nix could be settled if the various OSS word processor developers: - establish an OSS project that did nothing but make a portable module/class that did nothing but translate M$ Word files. All of the projects could contribute to this module and all of them would have the latest, greatest M$ compatibility at the same time. This would also ( god I hate this term ) save each of the projects the work of "having to reinvent the wheel" in regards to keeping up with M$. - establish a standard OSS file format set for all OSS office projects. Again, this would save them and new projects the work of making/maintaining their own. It would also help loosen the grip of M$ *.doc and *.rtf as the defacto standards. People would know that if they saved their files to *.oss that EVERYONE else would be able to read it. M$ may even be pressured in modifying office to save into *.oss. What the *nix desktop doesn't need is another word processor app.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[cubicledrone]

They do get fired for reasons - they screw up.

No, they get fired for entertainment. It's sport made of other people's suffering. A rather apt metaphor for the current employment environment.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[yog]

You'd think.

Unfortunately, Corel seems to have called it wrong several times in the past. They bought Wordperfect from Novell, a questionable move to begin with, and proceeded to sit on it and not market it aggressively.

They then half-heartedly began their Java/Linux initiative, came up with a very promising user-friendly Linux distro, and then dropped it.

More recently, I attempted to obtain the original Wordperfect for Linux from their website because I had a wordperfect document to convert--it's simply not available. When you consider the breadth and depth of the original Wordperfect Corp.'s offerings, where they had a powerful and universally respected product running on several platforms and the original CEO said he'd rather see it running everywhere even as pirated copies, this current stewardship of the Wordperfect line is just pathetic.

To top things off, Corel accepted a huge investment from Microsoft--the ultimate humiliation. Microsoft obviously just did it to fend off accusations of monopolistic practices (and to neutralize Corel in the PC office software and desktop OS space).

Now we're expected to trust Corel on this new initiative. Meh. I'll believe it when I see it. Corel once upon a time was an innovative company with its cool graphics software, but they've lost their edge. Too bad.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[drinkypoo]

To be fair, when OSX came out, a lot of geeks jumped ship from Linux (at least on the desktop - opendarwin is a less than ideal candidate for your firewall for example) to OSX. I doubt it caused any actual reduction of Linux desktop market share, though, just a deceleration of grown for the first year of OSX or so. Then all the people who can afford to drop $2k+ on a computer because it's pretty will have been satisfied, and Linux growth will have gone back to normal. Granted MacOS 10.3 is very neat and does some things Linux doesn't but they're mostly all eye candy things. Obviously, it's a lot easier to configure than your average Linux system, as well, though great strides have been made and continue to be made in that area.

Look,,, into the future

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Mac will *NEVER* grow its marketshare. It is what it is, and aint getting any bigger. Linux on the other hand, is seemingly poised for a significant boost in market share. So it could very well overcome mac in just a couple of years. PLus, there is a Mac version of MS office. On linux, they don't have to compete with that 1000 pound gorilla.

Re:Mac Desktop market

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not disagreeing that Windows is way ahead, but
there ARE Linux users, quite likely tens of thousands,
hacking their user-agent strings to get into brain-
damaged websites.

Re:To little to late?

[MCZapf]

I think Corel would actually do well for themselves by opening up the .wpd format. Then they could use the fact that WordPerfect is the most capable .wpd editor to gain sales.

What's so great about the .wpd format?

• It's consistent. It doesn't suffer from "random reformatting" as Word .doc does. Back in the day, I transferred WordPerfect documents between Windows and SunOS with no problems.
• Much more formatting ability than with RTF.
• File size is relatively small. Even PDFs I make from WordPerfect documents aren't that much smaller. (Though I don't use many images in my documents, which probably makes a difference.)

The problem is that it's proprietary. That's why I propose that Corel open the format.

Corel Linux

[Dark Fire]

Actually, Corel once had a pretty solid linux distribution based on debian. They sold it with the WordPerfect office suite. It was a very promising distribution. Promising enough that microsoft bought a 30% stake in Corel and several months later Corel dropped all work on linux related projects and started rambling on about a new windows strategy. It sounds like that didn't pan out and now they are looking to try linux again. I believe that microsoft sold some or all of their stake in Corel some time ago. If Corel would have kept on the linux path, their is a good chance that they might be in the position OpenOffice is today. Unfortunately, that opportunity has passed them by. Novel has realized that developing products for the Microsoft platform is fruitless and they are moving over to linux. As microsoft develops more and more functionality and integrates it into windows, more and more big software companies are going to realize that developing for the microsoft platform is fruitless. Microsoft develops it's own media player and integrates into windows. Microsoft will be integrating it's own firewall software and anti-virus software pretty soon. Some big software companies will stand by and watch as their markets dry up. The smart ones will be watching for their linux opportunity. And when that opportunity comes, it may only come once.

Re:No kidding.

[buysse]

Personally, I'd rather have Freehand. Never really liked Corel Draw all that much. Illustrator is an acceptable substitute.

Unfortunately, the Gimp is less than adequate as well for high-end work -- no CMYK support. I can't run a separation from it. There are good reasons for Photoshop -- and most of those reasons are patent-encumbered.

Re:To little to late?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

I think Corel would actually do well for themselves by opening up the .wpd format.

They have. [corel.com]

Re:Mac Desktop market

[LWATCDR]

Mac users do have Microsoft Office. The best place for a new office suite to start off in in a space that Microsoft does not compete in.

Re:Statistics...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two different subjects here, and they're not incompatible. One subject is Linux marketshare, the other subject is the market for commercial Linux software. Droleary is talking about the latter; everyone else is talking about the former. It's not even a disagreement--it's just people talking past one another.

I don't think there can be any honest dispute over the fact that if you include servers, Linux has already surpassed Mac in marketshare, and if you exclude servers, Linux is catching up rapidly. However, you also cannot dispute the fact that commercial software vendors are in no hurry to make Linux versions of their software.

These are not mutually incompatible. People only buy software when their existing software was not adequate. People used to buy web browsers and now they do not--does this imply that nobody uses web browsers anymore? Linux users had really shitty choices for word processors as little as three years ago. If someone had released a decent commercial Linux word processor back then, they'd have gotten close to 100% marketshare. Now Linux users have more than one good word processor, web browser, and e-mail client to choose from. They wouldn't buy commercial equivalents because they simply do not need them.

This is the bittersweet state of Linux today. Commercial vendors don't touch it--because of this, good OSS versions are created--then the commercial vendor belatedly creates a Linux port and nobody buys it because the OSS version is already good enough. Thus Linux marketshare grows and the "Linux software" section at CompUSA remains full of tumbleweeds. Commercial software vendors are putting themselves out of business by not supporting Linux at the level its marketshare warrants (i.e. more or less the same support level as MacOS). They are handing over the software market for the only growing desktop there is to OSS software that they never will be able to compete with on price.

Re:Mac Desktop market

[eugene ts wong]

I agree.

& to add to what you said, think of all the people who copy & install Windows under "fair use".

I would argue that more people in total & percentage wise have installed "free" versions of Windows. I'm just guessing though, so don't take my word for it.

I know for sure that people have copied & installed Windows freely.

CorelWine: Plays well with others

[gavriels]

Both of these assertions are incorrecect.

1) The Corel version of Wine was able to run other apps if you wanted it to. Certainly it was optimized for WPO, and you had to muck with some startup scripts to get it running other apps.

2) The WPO install specifically put all of its Wine related files in /usr/lib/corel/wine. It set the WINEPREFIX up to be ~/.wpo2000. Thus, it was explicitly designed to *NOT* interfere with any other Wine incarnation.

BTW, CodeWeavers Crossover products were not available until over a year after WPO2000 Linux shipped.

As I indicated above, the problem that most users ran into with the suite was the FontTastic font server requirement, and issues relating to that, NOT the Wine stuff.

Take care,
-Gav

Gavriel State, Co-CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.

Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up.

[bedouin]

Hrm, Linux sucks because of "lack of originality"? Hey, I'm the first person to admit that there are problems with the Linux desktop, but that's just silly.

Notice I mentioned originality with a lot of other qualities, qualities that when lacking together, make for a really poor experience. Lack of creative innovation is only one issue out of many that makes the Linux desktop experience lackluster.

Perhaps a better word choice would have been innovative ideas or new applications. What has KDE or Gnome brought to the table that hasn't been borrowed from somewhere else? What 'killer apps' has Linux produced? None really. Linux has its strength in being a rock solid server that costs absolutely nothing but the price of media or bandwidth. It also makes a great OS to install when you're on a budget, and have a strong enough sense of right and wrong not to install an MS product.

I use my computer to GET WORK DONE, as do millions of other people. I don't care if it's original or unoriginal; I care if it's secure, stable and performs well.

Well, that's probably my main gripe with Linux on the desktop: I don't get work done. I spent half my time battling with different package, or other types of dependencies every time I wanted to install a program that my distribution had not officially released a package for yet. Linux desktop installations will be a failure with average consumers until they can download, double click, install a program, and have a shortcut for it on their desktop in a couple minutes.

Or how about being able to walk into CompUSA and buy a scanner or similar device without checking 15 web sites before leaving the house to see if its compatible with Linux? And even if it is compatible with Linux, chances are you'll have to screw around for 2 hours before you get anything working. I'm sure you know the agony of buying a new video card, then spending the night making X11 work right with it, just so you can check your E-Mail before going to sleep.

If you're a coder Linux is a dream, and so is OS X for that matter. The only difference being, when I need to type 50 page papers for graduate school, I don't have to haggle with OpenOffice's clunky interface.

And to be honest, what good is OS stability when half the apps act like they're beta, even at the 1.0 mark? Show me a contender for Photoshop, Office, Final Cut Pro, and a slew of other apps. How about decent audio software for Linux? How about an easy way of authoring DVDs in Linux (something on par with iDVD)? Does that even exist?

When your wife brings you your tea, do you reject it because it's "unoriginal"? Do you stop going on trains because they're "unoriginal"? Tools to get things done

Nope, but if she put too much sugar in it, or it was too black -- or it was the wrong flavor, I'd probably complain. If the train only went 1/3 the speed of another competitor, I'd probably be willing to pay extra for the faster train, if I could afford it. That's a better analogy between OS X and Linux (and even Windows).

I'm totally for the idea of OSS, and I truly believe that's where the future of software is. Yet, until Linux produces something on par with OS X, I'm going to keep shelling out money to Apple.

Linux has mastered the server market. What can touch Apache? What admin wants to leap through 50 menus to accomplish what would only be a 1 line change in a config file? Developers pay attention to bugs in major Linux apps because so many people rely on them; on the other hand, the 1% of the people using Linux as a desktop all use 20 different E-Mail clients, and a bug report in your favorite client is just a drop in a bucket of some developer who probably works two jobs, goes to school, and then codes his little project on the side.

One last thing: as someone who relies on multiple languages, Linux language support, ESPECIALLY across different applications absolutely sucks.

With all that said, if one day Apple goes away, I'll be back running Linux, not Windows.