The U.S. Justice Department and Corel have a five-year deal worth about $13.2 million for over 50,000 licenses of Corel’s WordPerfect office suite, the company announced March 7, adding that this deal secures Corel as the maker of the number two such software suite in the market.
The company also jabbed at what it called “hype around open source solutions,” including OpenOffice.org.
Corel and Justice have done business before, of course—Justice had a previous deal to buy 35,000 copies of Corel WordPerfect in 1999. But the new deal is significant especially in the aftermath of Justice’s anti-trust suits against Microsoft that began in the mid-1990s.
A formal Corel announcement highlighted WordPerfect Office 12’s “flexible licensing agreements” as a main reason the suit’s installation base grows by a reported one million users per quarter. The DOJ bought WordPerfect again because it remains “the tool of choice for the legal arena,” DOJ program manager Mary Aileen O’Donovan was quoted as saying. “We do what our customers require.”
Justice hasn’t frozen Microsoft out, however: the department uses Microsoft Office in external communications with those it deals with outside the legal profession.
