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]