Red Herring Looks at Corel's Linux Strategy

Wellspring writes "Red Herring's done an article on Corel's Linux strategies. Interesting overview of what they're doing, but they seem to have half a hundred complaints about everything Corel is doing."

Comments

C'mon, Corel deserves a break.

[CodeShark]

IMHO while this article questioned nearly all of Corel's latest Linux moves, it ignored virtually all of the larger issues which make Corel a good member of the Linux community including such items as :

1. Backing the StrongArm chip via the Netwinder series. The article briefly mentions the Netwinder, but doesn't do justice to how important Corel was in getting the Linux port onto SA hardware for the rest of us who would like to move away from the 'x86 family.
2. The free download of Corel's GUI based Word Perfect 8 software.
3. Adding further US corporate branding and marketing experience to the Linux OS (with Caldera and Red Hat)
4. IIRC, they also participated against MS in the US DOJ trial, didn'they?
5. My final point...Corel Draw. I tell ya, if I could buy it for Linux right now, money would be changing hands.

There's probably more things which I would count as postive moves, but in the interest of brevity I'll skip it and say that for me the only redeeming part of the Red Herring article is that it mentioned that folks who report on investment are finally giving Corel a decent break in the news.

Well, that's my 2 cents worth.

Clueless article?

[ajs]

The most important Corel feature in the Linux world (and likely to be the most profitable) is their Corel Linux distribution. No mention is made of it, only Corel's acquisitions. In fact, Corel's stock price is mentioned, but no mention is made of the primary reason that Corel stock recenty jumped: the annoncement that they plan on providing a way to run Windows apps (ala Citrix) under Corel Linux.

So, what was this article supposed to be about, exactly, and why did the author not perform research? This really did not deserve the Slashdot Effect.

RedHerring v. Corel - Round 2

[Jakewk]

Corel is RedHerring's enemy #1 right now. This is not the first anti-Corel story they have written. Their "Investment Editor" R. Scott Raynovich wrote a scathing review of Corel about a month ago. He stated that Corel was "jumping on the Linux bandwagon", which seems kind of weird considering they've been porting their office suite for over a year now.
RedHerring's major problem is with Corel's management. And they have some valid points there, but I think RedHerring is underestimating Corel's technology and Linux effort. The question is whether the management issues are real and will outweigh their Linux development effort.
Rarely have I seen a company the target of so many negative articles by one source.

Positive news, but *HOW* positive?

[Christopher B. Brown]

I'll stay away from the "flameworthy" GraphOn issue; it's not self-evident how that one will be economically beneficial, and comparisons to Windows are rife with misconceptions.

What I'm not sure of is the economic merits of Corel Linux.

Note: I installed it last night on my laptop to replace a SuSE install. That went quite well; it took not much more than a cfengine run combined with dropping a previously-tuned XFree86Config file into place to get it acceptably configured, which was a whole lot more satisfactory than an attempt over Christmas holidays to install Debian on it.

(Aside: This laptop has had TurboLinux, SuSE, Debian 2.1, Red Hat, and now Corel Linux installed on it. With the happy merit that I have more-or-less generalized the set of stuff I need to fiddle with after install. Reinstalling means installing a base system + cfengine and then running a cfengine script to get networking fixed up. I probably ought to see if this all copes well with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD too, as I have CDs handy...)

Based on the "Day 1" results, I'm reasonably pleased with Corel Linux, as this was the least painlful install. (Well, grumble, grumble, Corel's package selection tool required a whole lot of mousing around, and having sprained a wrist the night before, the word "painless" may only be treated as true in a conceptual sense...)

You might expect that to bode well for the economics, but that is a questionable assumption.

• I didn't pay Corel anything for the install, as this was a $2 CD from LinuxCentral.

  I'd be game to send Corel a little something; I expect that sending them $10 would be a better deal for them than spending $40 on a boxed set...

  (More likely is the option of buying some shares in Corel... One of the few entertaining things I could do with the cash sitting in my SD-RRSP account when I was forced to sell off some telecom stocks, gripe, gripe, fascist CRTC...)

• I then proceeded to NFS mount a cache with chunks of Debian/Unstable to upgrade it. Mostly complete, and almost a seamless upgrade.

  Which implies that if the Debian Project does a good job of upgrading the "public" stuff, there will be little reason for there to be continuing revenue streams for Corel. Unlike the situation where people really do need to get upgraded CDs for RHAT or Caldera or SuSE.

It's all well and good for there to be a bunch of startups getting tossed in to produce "useful stuff." Unfortunately, "useful stuff" does not necessarily translate into profitable revenue streams, which is what Corel truly needs.

The Bandwagon

[Arandir]

Several complaints of Corel jumping on the bandwagon. First of all, they've been on the wagon for quite some time now with Wordperfect and the Netwinder. But secondly, who cares?

Why should anyone get upset that someone is jumping on the bandwagon? This is Free Software. Jumping on the bandwagon is the whole point of Open Source. I don't see anything at all in the GPL, Artistic, BSD, MIT, QPL or MPL that requires someone to get the approval of some self-appointed community before they can use, distribute or modify the software.