New Commercial Word Processor For FreeBSD

martin-k writes "There is commercial software built for FreeBSD after all... SoftMaker, a German vendor of office apps, just ported the TextMaker word processor to FreeBSD, making this the fifth platform it runs on (after Windows, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, and Linux). Blazingly fast, reads and writes Microsoft Word files seamlessly, and offers everything you expect from a modern word processor. Also coming to your desktop: the PlanMaker spreadsheet and DataMaker database package."

Comments

More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

TextMaker started out under Windows, got ported to Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs, Linux and now to FreeBSD.

Just for kicks, we did an x86 Solaris port in an afternoon. I guess we'll do a few more Unices -- except for Unixware, of course.

Re:Nice surprise

[__past__]

According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

As far as I understand, their main problem wasn't about porting, but about supporting another OS. I have little idea about what kind of framework they use, so I don't know how platform-independent their code really is, but it certainly has at least some potential to make support more complicated.

It would be really great if SoftMaker - or other company that made the same step, like Opera - would follow up with some data, like how many units they sold, how it affected their support expenses, etc. I can see why they wouldn't, but I would certainly be most interested in it.

I've used the demo TextMaker, and frankly it's awesome. [...] I'm certainly considering a purchase.

Well, more power to you, and SoftMaker for that matter. I don't want to be misunderstood: I think this is great - as a FreeBSD user and supporter I love these kinds of thing, and SoftMaker certainly gained some Geek credit points with it. I'm just surprised given the mostly negative feedback before. (And while I do not consider a purchase at all, simply because I can't even remember using an Office suite the last time, let alone for something OOo (which sucks more on FreeBSD than elsewhere, probably due to Sun's idea of portability - "any platform, as long as it's Windows, Solaris or Red Hat") or Gnome-Office wasn't sufficient, I realize that I'm simply not their target audience)

If this works, great. If it doesn't, we'll have a disgruntled commercial vendor and potentially (if they withdraw the offer) disgruntled end users. I'd hate this to happen because of unjustified expectations on either side.

Re:Productivity Problems

[judmarc]

I've recompiled and reinstalled the *entire OS* in 20 minutes. (1.5MHz machine.)

Sure there isn't something you're doing wrong?

Regarding Textmaker

[thanjee]

Has anyone here actually tried Textmaker? If it delivers what the web site states, then it is probably worth paying for. They have a free 30 day trial version which I am currently downloading. If I like it and think it will do a better job than the other software I am currently using then I will pay for it. If not, well hey, it is just fun trying new stuff out.

Re:Infringement?

[evilviper]

I am not a fan of commercial apps for OSS platforms, seems contradicting somehow

You've listened to RMS' ranting too much.

Portability: What commercial unix software needs

[harikiri]

The better the codebase is, and if indeed it is so portable a simple ./configure ; make install will suffice, the more platforms software "X" will run on. For commercial software, this means that they don't have to bend over backwards for a slight increase in marketshare by offering a commercial (if unsupported) piece of software for the more esoteric UNIX platforms out there.

Ie, if you were a company that created a word processor built on C/C++, and you had made an effort to use appropriate configure scripts on Unix to assist in creating builds, by putting a small amount of time in to enable the code to build on esoteric-platform-1, and it worked, you suddenly have an entirely new (if small) market to sell your product to.

However, if your application sucks, nobody is going to buy it. But if you sold each application with a license that enabled *any* platform (ie, pay $49 and download program for windows/linux/bsd), and not having to pay for a copy of the linux vs bsd version, woo.. happy endusers.

I dunno what I'm saying at this point, just rambling. :-)