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18.5.05 22:01 What if Novel had open sourced WordPerfect? (

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-- This entry is unfinished, but I'm releasing it as I don't find the time to finish it. Maybe I will update it later ---

I wonder how the IT world could have been different if Novel, which is a big open source and Linux supporter now, had open sourced WordPerfect middle of the 1990th.

For me, WordPefect was (and is?) the best Word Editor ever. I think it is still even better than OpenOffice (on Windows only). If Novel had open sourced WP few years ago, it may have changed the actual desktop situation (dominated by Microsoft, OS+Office). But maybe it was not possible few years ago to do what SUN is doing now with OpenOffice. Let's see.

What is WordPerfect
WordPerfect Office is an office suite including word processing (WordPerfect), Spreadsheet (QuattroPro), Presentation and relational database front end (Paradox). Here I'm talking only about WordPerfect (WP) Word processing. WP has a 27 year long history. It has been owned by several companies and be ported to many platforms.

It is owned by Corel (see history below). Some marketing facts (from Corel):

20 million users
current version: 12
63% cheaper that MS Office
specially strong in governmental and law markets

History of WordPerfect

By versions: see Wikipedia WordPerfect article

Other sources:

1980 Leading word processor software on MS DOS
1985 Refuse to port to MS Windows
1991 First Windows version of WP (Windows 3.0)
1994 Novell buy WP. Novell also buy QuattroPro
1994-1996 Novell failed to successfully merge WordPerfect and Novell, failed to create a competitive application suite
1996 Novell sell WP to Corel
2004 Corel is thinking again about releasing a Linux version.

OpenSource WordPerfect
If the world were in 1996 as it is today, Novell might have thinking about open sourcing WP (as Sun did with StartOffice) instead of selling it to Corel.
TBD: what could have happened? OpenSource situation in 1996?

WordPerfect and OpenOffice
By googling around for this article, I found few interesting information about WP. Here are some of them (in no particular order):

libwpd a general purpose library for reading WordPerfect files. See features and news. The most important news for me: "A version of WriterPerfect compatible with this version of libwpd is slated to be released with OpenOffice.org 2.0". WP support was one major missing feature of OpenOffice (though Sun StartOffice had a proprietary filter inside). Read this blog entry from Scott Granneman to see how you can convert your WP documents in batch with libwpd.