Comments on: Haansoft Makes Move on OS Market

By: Brendon Carr (Korea Law Blog)

Brendon Carr (Korea Law Blog) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:52:47 +0000

With Apple not even supporting displaying Korean in the beta of Safari 3, I can imagine the Korean language support for Pages is even further lacking beyond the Japanese version which means it’s probably unusable.

I used the beta of Safari 3 on OS X and assure you that Korean language text displayed perfectly. The Windows beta of Safari 3 initially did not display Korean, because the Apple font pack and input method for Safari/Win required additional engineering. Windows is not as well-engineered as OS X, so the foreign font handling is kludgey on Windows whereas in OS X it is all provided as a core OS service.

By: stafford

stafford — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:53:35 +0000

*Sorry that should be “sites”

By: stafford

stafford — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:52:50 +0000

“It won’t play Starcraft”
Hahahahahaha!
Won’t access internet banking either. Or render naver.com, or any government sights properly. In which case it’s doomed from the start.
From what I remember even Mac users have had issues using internet banking until only very recently.
God bless Virtual Box in Ubuntu (or VM Ware / Parallels if you’re on a Mac).
Once website designers start thinking about standards based implementation where we can access stuff independent of what platform we’re using only then maybe we can direct our attention to people sending stuff in rubbish .HWP format.

By: Zonath

Zonath — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 08:30:11 +0000

#12

They don’t necessarily have to release a free version, seeing as they’re probably ‘actually’ selling the wrapping (like the knock-off interface and whatever other ‘features’ they thought to toss in) while technically giving away the core for free… Not exactly a new business model. After all, it’s what Apple does with OS X, and that’s been going okay for them.

By: SomeguyinKorea

SomeguyinKorea — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 02:47:05 +0000

…not that a free version shouldn’t be made available anyways, as pointed out in #9.

By: SomeguyinKorea

SomeguyinKorea — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 02:45:53 +0000

I wonder. Is this the Linux distribution that was supposed to be developed by the Korean government? Shouldn’t it be free if it is?

By: Zonath

Zonath — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:45:42 +0000

I’m a Mac user myself so I don’t have much first-hand experience, but those screenshots look a lot like Vista

I’m a Vista user, and yeah… the screenies do make it look a heck of a lot like Vista. The obvious question is why they’re not pricing it more competitively… After all, it’s a rare consumer who will buy a knock-off at the same price they could get the real deal for. They’ll probably pander to the nationalist crowd to sell copies, but even so I don’t see them being even as successful with this product as they were with their hangul word processor.

…after all, it probably won’t even run Starcraft.

By: captbbq

captbbq — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:08:54 +0000

If they are charging 198,000 won for it, and not allowing it to be distributed for free, they are probably breaking the GPL license. Linux distros that do charge money are essentially charging for the 3rd party libraries included, customer support, and packaging/manual.

Not that I am surprised, the Korean p2p client Pruna is just stolen GPL licensed Emule code with an extra layer to make you log on with your National ID number before you go pirating movies from the same network that you could do so anonymously were you to just use the English version.

… that would have to be one of the most ironic lawsuits ever. The Open Source Foundation suing a Korean company for stealing the intellectual property of a program primarily meant to steal intellectual property (emule).

By: Peter Pan

Peter Pan — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:25:29 +0000

Metro:
Apple Pages will do multi-user changes tracking and it can do it compatibly with Word docs, but it serious lacks in support for non-latin character languages. I can’t do-away with Word for documenting in Japanese because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it write top-bottom, right-left, nor can I figure out how to tell it how many characters I want to get on one page nor can I figure out how to put the readings above the Chinese characters.

With Apple not even supporting displaying Korean in the beta of Safari 3, I can imagine the Korean language support for Pages is even further lacking beyond the Japanese version which means it’s probably unusable.

Open Office is promising, but it’s still just a copy of Word. Frankly I’d rather pay for legit software and get new features right away then get free software that’s 5 years behind and nothing but a clone. After all, that’s why I’m a Mac user and not a Windows user in the first place

By: SomeguyinKorea

SomeguyinKorea — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:51:35 +0000

#5,

As far as I know, even Open Office can’t work with the newer hwp files.