Hancom
Hancom (KOSDAQ: HAANSOFT) is an office suite software developer in Korea. Established in 1990, the company created Hangul, a native word processing program for the Korean language.
The story of Hancom mirrors the fortunes of Korea’s reborn software industry through support from the government. In 1998, the company nearly went bust, although it had been considered a national treasure: bad management, the Asian financial crisis, and software piracy had brought the company to its knees. Microsoft, which had about 15% market penetration in office apps at the time in Korea, offered US$20 million to Hancom to stop producing Hangul and instead resell Microsoft's localized Word program. For a small investment, Microsoft would have wiped out Hangul's main competitor completely in Korea, one of the few countries in the world that had still resisted wide adoption of Microsoft's office suite.
When the news of the deal broke, Koreans united in a national fervor and raised over US$10 million through a national campaign to save the company. In addition, Hancom’s near-bankruptcy brought the issue of software piracy under the national spotlight. As a result, Koreans began to pay for their software.[1]
In May 2017 Hancom lost a lawsuit in US Federal Court for violating the GNU GPL license as a consequence of using the source code of PostScript and PDF interpreter Ghostscript.[2] Ghostscript is dual licensed under both the Affero GPL License, or a commercial license. Under the Affero GPL terms, Hancom would be required to open source their code. Alternatively, they could have purchased a license.[3]
On May 27, 2020, Hancom Group announced the unveiling of the latest version of Hancom Office. [4]
Hancom Office
Hancom’s Office Suite remains the company’s main product. The suite is available in English and Korean. https://office.hancom.com
Product List
- Hancom Office Suite
- HanCell - spreadsheet program
- HanShow - presentation program
- HanWord (also called as Hangul-a.k.a. HWP)
- Hancom Office Hanword
- Hancom Office Hanword Viewer
- Hancom Office 2020 International Version
- Hancom Space
- Hancom Docs Converter
Discontinued Products
- Documen
- HanArum - office products
- HanGrim - vector drawing program
- Hangul Print - printing program
- HanMaek - Hangul I/O program
- HanTeX - Hangul TeX program
- NetHangul
External links
- Official website (English & Korean)
- Hancom Takes Vision of Information Independence to the Globe
- "Licensing Artifex Products".
- "South Korea Hancom Group Unveils Hancom Office 2020". www.prweb.com.
- "First Microsoft-Compatible Server Hosted Office Suite, ThinkFree Office 3 Server Launched". Applelinks.com. 2005-11-17. Archived from the original on 2014-12-11. Retrieved 2013-05-13.
- "Screen shots - Hancom Office 2010 SE Trial(English Edition) for Windows (License Key) 2010SE Shareware Software". Hancom-office-2010-se-windows.downloadpipe.com. Retrieved 2013-05-13.
- "한컴 씽크프리모바일 뷰어 `갤럭시 넥서스` 탑재 [디지털시대 경제신문 디지털타임스]". Dt.co.kr. 2011-12-27. Retrieved 2013-05-13.
- "Chan-Jin Lee". Forbes. 2012-04-18. Retrieved 2013-05-13.