On 5/26/06, Michael L Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ever since Corel's ill-fated Wordperfect for Linux venture, I've never
had much hope for any wine-wrapped "port." Wine is just way to non-
deterministic. Plus I've always had better luck with a system-wide wine
install and just install the windows apps into the wine environment. I
already had picasa running on my work machine this way many months ago.
Interesting that you mentioned that.
I worked part-time for Software Development Corporation (SDC) which
was contracted by WordPerfect in the mid-90's to supply a version of
WordPerfect that ran natively on about 7 flavors of Unix and Linux.
From 5.1 through 7 there was an X version and a console version, and
you could run it on everything from AIX to RedHat. It worked great,
even printing. The UNIX/Linux team consisted of 7 full-time
developers, who kept WordPerfect running on approximately 7 distinct
UNIX/Linux distributions. Compare that to ~60 or 70 developers in the
WP for Windows department of WordPerfect supporting...Windows 95.
(And later Windows 98)
Then Novell bought WordPerfect (the company). Then Corel bought
WordPerfect (the office suite) from Novell. Then Corel yanked SDC's
contract for doing the UNIX/Linux version of WordPerfect because they
"wanted to do it in-house". Corel's executive team are
technology-illiterate. I've heard story after story about how idiotic
Corel's execs are from the old-timers here (I work at a company whose
parent company is SDC, and some of the original SDC employees work
with me).
So, from what we can tell, they never had anyone with any *NIX
knowledge and never even attempted continuing the native port. Of
course, Corel proceeded to mess-up the Windows version of WordPerfect,
so that the only place I've seen it in the last 5 years is on my
grandma's Windows 98 box.
Stupid Corel. That was the end of the story as far as I knew, until I
saw your comment and went to winehq.org and read the history there.
Apparently the <sarcasm>geniuses</sarcasm> at Corel who yanked the
*NIX version "in-house" decided to just try to run the whole dang
office suite in Wine, at a time where Wine had just become mature
enough to run 2 windows applications...barely. It apparently gave
wine a little bump in development at the time, but Corel eventually
realized that Wine wasn't a magic "everything will magically and
immediately" work solution, and dropped it along with any reasonable
hope of a non-windows version of WordPerfect as long as it's in
Corel's hands.
Last note: Corel execs actually almost open-sourced "the *NIX
version" of WordPerfect in the late 90's. SDC, who was still making
good money doing the ports and selling *NIX WordPerfect, had to call
them up and explain that "the *NIX version" and "the Windows version"
had the SAME source code, not to mention that they had licensed
multitudes of 3rd-party stuff in WordPerfect and that if they gave out
that 3rd-party source code (violating all sorts of stuff), they would
likely get sued into oblivion. In retrospect, knowing that Corel
pulled SDC's contract and ran WordPerfect into the ground, it would
have been interesting to see what would have happened if SDC had just
kept quiet about the open-source implications, and opened up the
source code minus the licensed 3rd party stuff. OpenWordPerfect.
We've still got access to the source code today, but even assuming
Corel suddenly wised-up and decided to give it a chance, it would take
major work to even get it to compile on today's distros, not to
mention that a lot has happened to word processors in the last decade.
~ Nathan
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