Installing WordPerfect (was Re:RPM compatability)

[Paul King]

On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 16:47 +0000, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On Feb 4, 2008 3:13 PM, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > Yeah corel stupidly thought wine was a solution to the porting problem.
> 
> That may seem obvious in retrospect; at the time, they had a lot of
> programmers with heavy MSFT knowledge, and that makes WINE attractive
> to leverage that knowledge, rather than them having to either:

I don't think so. Corel had to undergo a _major_ porting effort with its
acquisition of Borland's Quattro Pro, Presentations, and Paradox
packages, along with their WordPerfect acquisition from Novell. At the
time, there was no UNIX version for these products. It was simply easier
to port the binaries nearly unchanged through WINE than to port all
these products into UNIX code so it could run like WordPerfect did.

Since WP was already native to UNIX, there was no need to port from the
Windows source. But they did it anyway, since I think it was reasonable
for them to see that porting all that software from Windows would
probably take a couple of years or more. They may have felt pressure
from the Open Office and other GNU projects as well.

> a) Create a second product, because "WP for Unix" would have great
> gobs of it that would be completely separately developed,
> b) Build or buy something akin to Bristol's "emulation of Windows on Unix."
> 
> To pick WINE as a version of strategy b) isn't *clearly* stupid.

I agree that it wasn't stupid, but it sucked all the same.

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