Hancom/theKompany.com Merge Product Lines, Announce Qt-3.0 Office Suite

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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Comments

by Erik Kjær Pedersen (not verified)

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.

by Shawn Gordon (not verified)

What in the world are you talking about? We never took over kmysql. What we did try to do was lend resources to it, but as both teams found out the code base for kmysql was going to require a complete re-write so we decided to go off and work on Rekall instead, this was an upfront conversation amoung the teams working. Please don't try and blame us because a project dies, there are lots of projects that get started and never finished, as a matter of fact that is probably true of most projects.

I'm sorry to hear you think our influence has been negative, but I think your opinion is based on flawed information.

by Erik Kjær Pedersen (not verified)

You may be right. There is nothing that has saddened me quite as much in the kde project as the death of kmysql. I may have had a wrong impression of why that happened. If so I am sorry

Erik Kjær Pedersen

by Alain (not verified)

You don't have to be very sorry. It is natural that you had such a reaction because nobody informed you. (happily the Kde1 compatibility libs was some good help)

I see a similar thing in the last KC KDE about KWinTV. The users were not informed that nobody maintened it and the KDE team had not a big attention for maintening it. Happily, a developper involved himself in this program. Thanks to him, but I think that such a care has to be collective, at first. And the first thing to do is to give information...

Of course, there are also many consciensious guys who announce that they stop and search somebody to continue...
But perhaps it would be useful to give some recommandations for the KDE developpers, saying particularly that the team has to be advertised when a developper stops to maintain (think also about a sudden die or accident...)

The more KDE is popular, the more it needs to be considerate towards the durability of its programs...

by Alain (not verified)

Perhaps you may use SqlGUI ? http://apps.kde.com/na/2/info/vid/3762

by dave (not verified)

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 :¬)

by James Sparenberg (not verified)

Yes I have. And it does work. Very well as a matter of fact. I've been using Hancom's products since HangulWord1.0 (about 10 years ago) on an amiga 500 running a Dos emulator. The products have continueally been very easy to use even when I didn't speak or read Korean. I've found that under Linux (Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat 7.0) it's sits stably on my box. It opens and runs faster than Star Office by a long shot, and has yet to fail in the arena of opening those *%^$ m$.doc files people keep sending me. I've opened edited and saved M$.doc and Exhell files, sent them to windows users and they have been able to open them without fail. In short I use it daily. Have been since they started looking for beta testors. My wife uses it to enable her to exchange Korean documents with her family and has also found that it works equally well with the Korean version of windows and m$ office. 2.0 doesn't have the import filters yet but when it does I for one will be installing it immediately.

PS if you want to know why Hancom is in M$'s path look here http://linuxtoday.com/stories/10715.html

by Root_42 (not verified)

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.