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  Hancom/theKompany.com Merge Product Lines, Announce Qt-3.0 Office Suite
Applications Posted by Dre on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @12:28
from the news-from-the-floor dept.
During the first day of the LinuxWorld Expo, Hancom Linux and theKompany.com became the talk of the show with the news that they are merging their product lines and releasing a complete Linux/KDE office suite this coming November. Dubbed "HancomOffice 2.0", the suite will combine 4 Hancom products (Word, a word processor, Sheet, a spreadsheet, Presenter, a presentation program, and Painter, a bitmap drawing program) with 4 theKompany.com products (EasyDB, a personal database management system familiar to us as reKall, Envision, a diagram and flowchart drawing tool familiar to us as the KOffice component Kivio, WebBuilder, an HTML/PHP editing tool familiar to us as Quanta+, and QuickSilver, a personal information manager familiar to us as Aethera). The Word/Sheet/Presenter applications are advertised as outstanding at both importing and exporting the corresponding MS Office formats. Because it uses Qt 3.0 the same boxed set will run on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and -- yes -- even embedded devices (some planned devices were announced). Although the products are pure Qt, with 3.0's new features they should integrate nicely into the KDE desktop. Suggested retail price: $99. Ready or not, KDE is coming to Main Street!


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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
What does it mean for KOffice?
by reihal on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @12:49
No more Kivio? And what about ReKall?
Perhaps Shawn Gordon can explain.
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Good news or bad news?
by sarang on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @13:38
I don't know whether this is good news or bad news. Here we have, another office suite coming in town.. that means another set of file formats to take care of. Is TheKompany planning to keep all file formats open? Or are they heading in the same dirty direction of M$ where the file formats are not documented atall!

Its based on Qt3 and we know that KDE 3 isn't coming out anytime soon. That means Qt3 won't be installed by default.. When Qt3 is installed on top of Qt2, what happens?

Now what lies in future for KOffice? What happens to Kivio, ReKall, Aethera? Does the GPL development stop suddenly?

Anyway, definitely a good news that another application suite is coming to Linux and esp. KDE! Star office is too bloated since it uses its own UI library and nobody else used the KDE/Qt framework till now.. So this could head towards success!!

Finally, I just hope they select some better names.. Hancom, QuickSilver etc. are not at all trendy..

sarang
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Is it a joke ?
by azerty man on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @14:24
Have a look at the screenshots on Hancom website.
The last ones seem to be Quanta+ and Kivio under winXP ?!!
WebBuilder is Quanta+ and Painter is Kivio.
Have they ever read the GPL ?
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Competition between friends
by not me on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @14:50
I'm confused. So far theKompany and KDE have managed to stay out of each others' way for the most part, but this move puts theKompany and the KDE project in direct competition! What will happen to KOffice? Will developers lose interest and switch to using HancomOffice? Will KOffice continue to improve and eventually replace HancomOffice, hurting theKompany and Hancom? Do theKompany and Hancom hope to perpetually improve their HancomOffice product so that it is always ahead of the features of KOffice?

Some informed comment would be great here. David Faure, Shawn Gordon? Comments?
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500MHz recommended
by Konqi on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @14:52
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
Pentium or better processor (500MHz recommended)

Come on, 500MHz for a stinking Office Suite. The last MS Office I ran (Office97) ran fine on a 486. I would say these guys have some serious optimization problems to sort out.
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Who says StarOffice is bloated ? ;-)
by antialias on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @15:09
Hm, evaluation version of HancomOffice (without TheKompany's products) has 95 Mb!
Who says StarOffice is bloated ;-)
I'll stick with KOffice, just hoping that KOffice developers will stick with it too :)
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filters?
by LMCBoy on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @15:17
"The Word/Sheet/Presenter applications are
advertised as outstanding at both importing
and exporting the corresponding MS Office
formats."

Any chance that the Kompany will share their I/O filters with the KOffice crew?

That would be nice...
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An Office Suite for Every Day
by bambi on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @15:26
Monday: KOffice
Tuesday: OpenOffice
Wednesday: StarOffice
Thursday: Abiword
Friday: WordPerfect
Saturday: ApplixWare
Sunday: Lyx

If I knew a little more English, I could even make a poem about it ...

--Bram
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Nicely integrated with KDE ?
by Krame on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @15:37
I'm afraid that it will not be integrated with KDE. The KParts are KDE-only solution, so probably those programs will live its own life - something like a next ( lightweight probably ) StarOffice. I've heard something about COM capabilities of Qt - but I was able to find only something about generating uuid's and a single pure virtual class. If we have got a simple interface like QOleDocument ( which, implemented, should result in a cross-platform embeddable component ) we would be able to write a real cross-platform applications - but now they have to follow a StarOffice path. I think that a very few people will use it on Linux. What a pity !
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Odd mix of products
by larryw on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @15:56
This seems a little odd to me. I'm not very familiar with Hancom's products, but they look pretty mature. ReKall and Aethera are not yet ready for prime time. Last time I tried Aethera (maybe a month ago) I'm not sure it did much of anything (I remember it crashing, if that counts). I had high hopes for Rekall because I had done some work with KDB and found it to be pretty feature-complete, but when I installed it, I discovered that it had a ways to go, especially WRT the UI. I know it's early in the game, but it seems a little premature to be slapping these partially finished products in with the mature ones (Quanta is very nice) and call it an office suite.

Just my $.05...
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What happens when a GPL app is relicensed?
by William Wise on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @20:33
What happens if, say, I'm using a GPL app called kdegplapp version 2.1 and the original author and copyright holder decides to relicense to a proprietary license? Can I branch the code at 2.1 and continue to develop the codebase? Can the author retroactively decide that I can't use the application? I'm confused as to what the implications are...

Will
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This can only be good news...
by Gregory W. Brubaker on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @20:46
I see no harm that can come from this...
I'm an Open Racer developer ( a very small one on a very great and much more talented team ), and our goal is to keep the Tux Racer (turning Comercial) code base alive... We do not damn Tux Racer, we wish it success!

If we have life our way, we will replace Tux Racer on all Distros (especialy the GPL'd release), while Tux Racer will grow and offer a serious, and cool, comercial offering for those who are willing to pay for it...
I think Open Source and Comercial can live together... Until any comercial product overly dominates and gets Greedy... Then, and only then, is it important that all comercial and Open operations come together and bring an open standard...

If you are fighting Microsoft, you would see that Open Source and Comercial offerings are a good thing... (However, this might be a distorted view)

If you are fighting all comercial operations, and really believe this product will enslave the world... You are even wronger, because Open Source alternatives will not slow...
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why this commercial advertisement on the dot?
by anonymous on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @00:39
Why was this article not marked with '[Ed: commercial software]' or something, like similiar previous articles? And what's the direct relation to KDE for a pure Qt based office suite that ships software that is no more maintained inside KDE (kivio...) ? I for one don't think this article belongs to the dot. It's a commercial advertisement of a non-KDE software.
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What a challenge for the KOffice team !
by Alain on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @02:41
One month ago, I said that I didn't feel that the strategy of the Kompany was clear. Now, it is...

There is a good size and a bad size. I prefer look at the good size : a new challenge for the KOffice team is to build the best KDE Office. Even, it has to be the first challenge now...

And it would not be easy. The Hancom Office page is pretty and some things are very in advance, comparing to KOffice.

There is a big work to do for enhancing the existing good young apps, for reactiving some sleeping apps (Krayon, Kivio, Quanta Plus...) and for creating some new apps (Katabase...). What an exciting challenge ! I hope that new developpers will be interested and involved !

And I hope that it will be a fair challenge, that easy and efficient filters will be built between the two offices...

My best encouragments for the KOffice team !
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Word?
by Anonymous Troll on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @02:45
Word?? Their word processor is called Word?? Obviously these guys weren't paying attention when KIllustrator got sued for violating Adobe's trademark..
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Redhat compatible?
by Hasso Tepper on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @08:07
PLATFORMS
HancomOffice is installable and executable stably based on the Red Hat and Red Hat compatible Linux distributions such as RedHat 7.0/7.1, Mandrake Linux 7.0/8.0, SuSE Linux 7.0.
Libraries: same as libraries in the Red Hat and the compatible libraries
RPM: the latest 4.0.2 rpm version or previous rpm

/me hmmmz ... Redhat 7.0/7.1 and Mandrake 8.0 are using gcc-2.96 and this ABI is NOT compatible with gcc-2.95 or gcc-3.0. Problems ...
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ftp.kde.org needs authorization !!!???
by Asif Ali Rizwaan on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @08:08
What happened to ftp.kde.org, I just can't get there it always asks for authorization and also I can't login as an anonymous user
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Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by Shawn Gordon on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @09:22
Let me take an opportunity to try and answer all the questions at once, so this might be a rather long email.

1. it is "Rekall" and not "ReKall" :)
2. All theKompany products will continue to exist in the stand alone form.
3. We will continue to maintain Kivio in KOffice. Waldo Bastian and I had a nice chat around the end of LinuxWorld on the topic and I think he understands what we are doing.
4. Since Kivio is the only application currently in KOffice that is affected by this, it doesn't have any major impact.
5. We will statically link Qt3 to the application. We are doing this with DataArchitect currently, and with Kivio MP in our labs. Works great, barely adds any size and doesn't mess with your system.
6. I had about 3 days to come up with new names for theKompany products for the show, some I like, some I don't - consider them code names for now.
7. Hancom can call their application HancomWord because it is MicrosoftWord. This is a common way to avoid trademark problems in the US to put your company name in front of the application.
8. We had never decided to put Rekall into KOffice, and now that it will be Qt only it will never be in KOffice. If you think about it, there isn't really an advantage to embedding a database app inside a KWord document.
9. The current HancomOffice applications have been around for 10 years, they are very mature. Hancom has a very large number of programmers as well. HancomWord has run on Linux under Wine until now, the Qt port is almost complete and will be part of HancomOffice 2.0
10. theKompany holds the license on all of the applications we are using. In the case of Kivio and Quanta, these have gone through a total rewrite in any case to turn them into Qt specific apps.
11. Apparently Quanta development has been stalled for some time. I wasn't aware of this fact when the programmers asked us to take it on. I had been using them as contractors for work and they are great programmers, but I guess they had to make some money so couldn't work on Quanta. In any case we have hired them as employees now. I'm not sure if there will be a free version of Quanta, we've talked about it but just haven't had any time to figure it out yet.
12. Yes that is Kivio running on WinXP. Using Qt it is a very easy matter to make the application run on different platforms.
13. I really am impressed with the work that has gone into KOffice over the years, but you have to be realistic about it. There is only a couple of people working on it part time. KOffice is so far behind HancomOffice it will never catch up. That isn't to say that KOffice isn't what some people will want or need. KDE is interested in the desktop more than the office space, they want to see applications that people will use on the desktop. Our focus on Linux is always going to be advocates for KDE and making sure our Qt apps behave and interact properly under KDE. All of our materials at the LinuxWorld show talked about KDE on Linux.
14. I'm running HancomOffice on a 200Mhz machine at home. I'm not sure why the requirements are listed so large.
15. HancomOffice has an enormous amount of clipart, like 900 pieces, which contributes to its size. As stand alone applications they aren't that large.
16. The MS filters are Hancom intellectual property and are very unlikely to be given away. They do an *excellent* job of import *and* export of MS file formats. I was very impressed.
17. Kparts can't be used because of the cross platform nature, so we will sadly be building a lightweight in-process OLE type model on Qt3 to support embedding (sorry if I got some of that wrong, I don't code much anymore).
18. There is work to do on some of theKompany applications to get ready and now we have the needed resources to accelerate their work. We should hit our November release target.
19. Since we will be statically linked to Qt3 there aren't going to be any distribution specific problems.

Let me say in closing that the interest at LinuxWorld was nothing short of astounding. We had virtually every major player want to partner with us, people wanting to put it in their companies. I had to do 5 interviews while I was there after our press release. The booth was busy the entire time, really busy, which couldn't be said for a lot of the booths. We had people up to the final minutes. There is a tremendous amount of excitment over this. As you all know, I stay involved in these talkbacks and in emails. I'll be glad to answer questions if you have them.

Shawn
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Hate to say this...
by steven on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @17:10
Not "KDE is coming to Main Street", but QT is. And I don't think any KDE fan should like that. Not that QT is bad, of course it's great and all. But it's not a KDE product these guys are planning. Why don't they use all those wonderfull features KDE adds to QT (such as KPrinter etc.)??
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Free Software or don't bother...
by Nick Mailer on Saturday 01/Sep/2001, @03:47
I didn't switch to GNU/Linux and KDE merely to see organisations like the Kompany transform it into a propriatory Microsoft Lite environment. For some, including me, the move was more philosophically driven than practically. As such, I have to say that I see the Kompany more as a kind of leech, particularly in the latest announcement, than a userful contributor to everything behind the spirits of the projects they supposedly emerged as supporting.

I wish KOffice the best of luck, because our and our children's intellectual freedom is only assured through a freely developed infrastructure upon which it may be expressed.
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Risk
by Erik Kjær Pedersen on Saturday 01/Sep/2001, @06:29
I think we are seeing once again that there is a risk having commercial companies mix in with open source. There used to be a very nice program, kmysql. It was taken over by thekompany, and turned into vaporware. We still use it, using the kde1 compatibility libs, and I guess with the database features of qt3, something like it will probably be resurrected. But in the meantime the effect has been largely negative. What I mean is that commercial companies as in this vcase thekompany, can stifle opensource projects with their promises, and that, as nice as they may be, one should not trust them, and I am including theKompany in this statement.
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Anyone even used 1.5??...
by dave on Sunday 02/Sep/2001, @06:23
I've been searching the web in vain for a review of their 1.5 :( The only reviews I've found for any of their stuff in english has been for their original wordprocessor - suffice it to say, most ppl seemed to think that it sucked (been bassed largly around wine) - Can it render fonts better than the likes of staroffice? I'm hoping it'll do anti-aliasing, but it doesn't say anywhere :(

I'm probably one of the few people that would like to buy it - if it supports QT properly, it should (I hope!) support font anti-aliasing and it seems to have a good selection of MS import/export filters (which are unfortunatly important to me.) KWord is good, but it's lacking in export filters, Star Office would be great if I could just read the damn text :¬)
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CJK support?
by Root_42 on Sunday 02/Sep/2001, @08:41
More interesting is the question, wether they will have support for Chines, Japanese or Korean, because that was Hancom's primary feature. Asian language input is still a problem in KDE2.
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