Haansoft, the people that brought you the Hangul Word Processor, have released Asianux Desktop 3, an updated version of their Linux OS (complete with 3D computing environment), with an eye to breaking Microsoft’s deathgrip on the PC operating system market. The product looks super-cool, and as a Linux user, I wish them the best of luck, but seriously, you’ve got to be smoking crack to pay 198,000 won for a Linux OS when you can download the Korean version of Ubuntu for free. (PS: I should note the piece is a bit dated, from June)
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16 Comments
Yeah, and Ubuntu is nothing short of being amazing. For that price, I hope it comes preloaded with a damned good selection of Hansoft’s products.
If it’s as buggy and bloated as their HWP software, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Paying money for linux is asinine…
Oh, I wouldn’t worry…it’ll wind up being free after a spell.
I’m a Mac user myself so I don’t have much first-hand experience, but those screenshots look a lot like Vista (by a lot I mean they only changed the logo for the start menu).
There is a huge tendency with free OSS to just emulate what other software makers are doing, but at least Ubuntu isn’t a clone but something on its own.
If they want to break the deathgrip, they should try installing professional features. I hate Microsoft the same as the next Apple user, but MS Word runs circles around that steaming turd 아래아 한글. No Track Changes mode, or any of the bazillion features within that mode (such as tracking individual users’ changes), which you just fucking NEED when dealing with editing drafts of documents for $$$.
Which is why our publication office at UNESCO doesn’t use it. Because it sucks.
I’m all for breaking strangleholds, especially when they’re held by Microsoft. But if you suck, you suck.
Oh, and there’s no Mac version. Which you might say doesn’t matter to Koreans, but there are an awful lot of people sending files in all kinds of fields, especially those that directly deal in trade, and working with an .hwp file is like writing in Korean – you might as well do that, since no one’s gonna be able to read it.
That’s without even getting to all the people who get dissertations, important documents, contracts, and all kinds of other crap to foreign eyes of some type before the final stage – and requiring a copy of 아래아, whether PC or Mac, means trouble.
Somebody should go report Haansoft to the police, or perhaps go knock on their door late on a weekend night, because they are smoking some really, really good dope.
And to second the other opinions here – why wouldn’t I go install Ubuntu for free, if I’m going to be of the disposition to install an alternative OS in the first place?
Especially if it looks like a copy of Ubuntu.
We should go hang out with the Haansoft boys, getting high and running 아래아 on their new operating system. Maybe they’ll have some coke and hookers to go with that?
#5,
As far as I know, even Open Office can’t work with the newer hwp files.
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
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).
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.
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?
…not that a free version shouldn’t be made available anyways, as pointed out in #9.
#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.
“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.
*Sorry that should be “sites”
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.