[Fwd: Re: [luau] WordPerfect for Linux]

[W. Wayne Liauh]

Scott-

Below is my follow-up message to Warren.  I did not know that what I 
thought was a personal note to Warren was going to be posted at LUAU.  I 
wouldn't have written my comment to Warren had I not had great respects 
and deep appreciation for him.

"[T]ireless", "(and thankless)".  Two words that most succintly describe 
Warren's leadership in our little Linux community here (just wish it 
could be much bigger, also I don't believe most of our local people are 
aware that Warren is a very prominent national figure on the AMD forum). 
 Actually I have invited Warren to the Bankers Club for lunch a couple 
of times, he was always too busy to accept it.

Well, from your message, it appears that Warren is not that 
unappreciated.  :-)


Best,


W. Wayne Liauh, Ph.D., J.D.
Attorney and Counselor at Law




Warren-

Thanks for the reply.  Truth is the best defense to any defamation 
suit.  What you are saying about Corel and WordPerfect are absolutely 
true.  However, that does not prevent someone from suing you.  Defending 
a law suit can be very expensive, even though you have a perfectly 
legitimate defense.  Of course, you don't have to worry about anyone 
ever thinking about suing you.  But, for me, it is a different ball 
game, and I have to be stupidly careful and stupidly ultra-sensitive.

I have been making extremely critical comments against Corel s CEO in 
several public forums, however, I am prepared to take on a fight with 
Corel management.

Now getting back to the WordPerfect issue.  Dealing with Corel has been 
one of the most frustrating experiences of my professional life.  
However, they own the product that I have to rely on to make a living.

Gav and I had a long talk when he was leaving Corel.  Personally, I don 
t think WINE is the solution for WordPerfect or most Windows based 
programs.  Gav will tell you that it is easier to port Windows games to 
Linux using WINE, because games require less APIs, and most of them are 
better documented and more straightforward.  Porting WYSIWYG 
wordprocessors with WINE, however, is a very different story.  I don t 
think it will ever be possible, if not prohibitively expensive, to port 
most of the APIs necessary to run WordPerfect into Linux.

Then we will run into the testing problems.  For commercial software, 
code development counts for only 10% of the total cost.  Microsoft 
writes good software because it has an army of competent and willing 
outside testers.  If we want to encourage and induce business owners to 
adopt Linux, we must make sure that we can provide a turn-key solution 
which has been thoroughly tested under similar conditions.  At the 
present time, this piece of the Linux puzzle is seriously missing.

I am trying to find a few volunteer lawyers from the Hawaii Bar 
Association to test the Linux solution.  Preliminarily, I am very 
pleased to find out that WordPerfect 8 seems to provide all the features 
necessary to produce complicated documents.  Of course, it is much more 
fun to use OpenOffice/StarOffice than this old dog.  However, there are 
quite a few critical features that are not yet available in OO/SO, also, 
neither program has been reliably tested.  With time, perhaps OpenOffice 
will have enough features be the solution for law offices.  But at the 
present time, the best solution seems to be using WordPerfect 8 for 
official/office use, and OpenOffice for other chores.

That said, I believe WINE will be very useful in porting other key 
windows programs, such as time-tracking, billing, accounting, etc. to 
Linux.  However, the first step, as far as converting law offices to 
Linux is concerned, is to satisfy our wordprocessing needs.  As I 
indicated above, WordPerfect 8, which is a natively compiled Linux 
program, seems to be extremely promising.

Just a few random comments.

Best,


W. Wayne Liauh, Ph.D., J.D.
Attorney and Counselor at Law



Joe Linux wrote:

>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> Re: [luau] WordPerfect for Linux
> From:
> "R. Scott Belford" <sctinc at flex.com>
> Date:
> Wed, 8 May 2002 19:20:28 -1000
> To:
> luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu
>
>
> Wayne,
>
> Please allow me to reply and ask that you show greater respect for 
> Warren.  Your newness to this group denies you the knowledge that 
> Warren Togami has been more instrumental to the mass adoption of open 
> source software than any other human I know.  His tireless (and 
> thankless) efforts to answer nearly any tedious question posted to 
> this group has earned him great reverence.  Your request that he not 
> express his ideas to this newsgroup is VERY unwelcome.  As you can 
> read from Warren's response to your flame, he is more than willing to 
> help be a part of this solution that you seek.  This is how a man 
> thinks and responds to such taunts.  Having Warren assist you and 
> other WP8 users will be to your advantage.  Your condescending and 
> uninformed comments admonishing Warren to refrain from his insights 
> are inappropriate at best.  You will find a wealth of assistance here 
> if you take the time to learn who your allies are.  Please keep the 
> tone more civil in future posts.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> R. Scott Belford
>
>

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