That would be nice -- if they ported Turbo C/Pascal/ASM to linux/elf and put it under a free license, maybe x86 linux users would have a decent compiler besides lcc.
Good news for Qt
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
This announce is a good news for Qt. You should remember that Corel distribution is based on KDE, which is based on Qt. The next step will be the port of Delphi to Qt. See you soon...
The arrangement, which offers Inprise/Borland shareholders 0.747 of a Corel common share for each share in Inprise/Borland, will give Inprise/Borland shareholders approximately
44 percent ownership of Corel.
So the companies are almost equal in size - they probably just had to decide who oficially buys whom for some tax/stock reasons.
Re:Why the drop?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Normally, the buyers stock is supposed to drop because their stockholders are paying the premium to acquire the other company beyond what it is worth. In a few cases, when the companies mesh together well (or they are dot.com companies!) they can both go up.
Re:Wow.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
What are you talking about? GCC is one of the finest compilers available ANYWHERE right now. Sure it doesn't have the greatest CPU specific optimizations, but it practically guarantees portability across supported platforms by being consistent and stable. It compiles code many other compilers barf on.
VCL for Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
It's my hope that this merger will mean more apps for Linux. As you may know Borland is hard at work porting their VCL (Visual Component library) to Linux. They already have a program that can convert a program written in MFC to VCL for Windows, and when the Linux version is out Poof! a whole shload of Linux software just pops up. I would speculate that Corel uses Borland products so they are really interested in that type of platform independence. Just a speculation though
Re:Canadian buys Yank
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Yeah, I hope they move some of those jobs up here. The US sucks up all of our best coders, and then screws ME over every time I cross the border to do some consulting work in the states, simply because I am a Canadian citizen and, in their words, "I am taking work away from Americans". It'd be nice to see some payback by moving those Borland jobs up to Canada. Preferably BC.
Re:Canadian buys Yank
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
2.44 billion USD is NOT a *change*
corel
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
everything corel do, they mess up, ie., corel linux etc. is this goodbye delphi? in the long term, yes. but, being positive, hopefully, borland development tools will be ported to macs as well.. since corel support these fine machines as well...
Re:WTF?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Remember, Phillipe Kahn (sp?) almost drove Borland into the ground trying to be another Microsoft (buying WordPerfect and Ashton-Tate) instead of concentrating on Borland's key strengths. (Novell is another company that tried the same strategy and hasn't been as strong since).
No, it was Novell that bought WordPerfect, not Borland.
Re:Little MS is born
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Sure thing, buddy. Win2K slays any operating system that Corel has ever even dreamt of releasing.
Re:Wow.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
It compiles code many other compilers barf on.
Yes. Microsoft's J++ does that kind of "embrace and extend" too. Both GCC and J++ have subtle "extra features" that, when programmers use them, turn their code into something that can be built solely on that particular compiler. ***
It got discussed to death on Usenet this past year.
(*** when GCC is run with error checking to flag any non-ANSI compliant code, it doesn't flag everything. The GCC team are famous for thumbing their nose at the C Standards committee.)
Re:heres an idea...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The above post should be marked down as off-topic\ (so should this post)
Re:Is Corel "Serious" about Linux?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Nah. Redhat owns Cygnus, the people who write GCC (for all intents and purposes, noone else really contributes anymore). With Cygnus, Redhat has the number ONE development platform available for Linux (and other systems). Corel is buying a Windows development company who have only in the last few months discovered Linux even exists. Frankly I don't think it'll work out.
It's called being sent down to the minor leagues
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
When your company can't survive the competitive Windows market, it's time to pack your bags and start giving your software away to Linux users before it dies out completely.
Re:Distribution Wars.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Maybe Corel will re-engineer their Linux so that the kernel builds on non-GPL'd Borland C/C++. Then they can add code to it that breaks GCC and be on their merry proprietary way.
I know I'd LIKE a non-GCC to implement a completely non-GNU freenix. Maybe NetBSD could be ported over to a non-GNU Borland C.
Re:Wow.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I belive they ported Interbase.
Re:This is good for the Linux Community
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
their best programmers "stollen" by Microsoft You mean Bill offered them some cake? The amount of sheer illiteracy on Slashdot - and the internet in general really, never fails to amaze me...
Oh, and "stollen" is a kind of cake, for anyone who didn't get it.
Re:But what do they get?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Here's what they get: A company with excellent compiler and GUI/IDE/RAD technology that's been battle hardened by competing with MS for over a decade. Remember, Borland was the company that invented "competitive upgrade pricing" eons ago, and has shown time and time again how tough a competitor they are.
Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic as hell that MS almost kills off both Corel and Borland, both companies jump on the Linux bandwagon, merge, and are now poised to be a very serious threat to MS in the business world? I guess that what goes around really does come around.
Re:Wow.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
What, GCC isn't perfect? OMFG! Alert the press. Call God. Strike that. Call Linus.
Anyone want to compile this with GCC and tell me what happens when i is >= 7?
I'll tell you what happens with a _real_ compiler...;)
main() { float x = 3.14; long i; for (i=0;i<1000000000;i++) x=x*x; }
Re:This is good for the Linux Community
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
"Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware"
BSD: Because rebooting every week for a new Kernel is for Linux.
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Well, you are wrong on at least one assumption: I am professionnal developper, was trained in the GUI world of Mac and Windows, and I will not consider developping software for Linux until there's a GOOD IDE available for it. Like the one Borland provides. I still consider having to learn arcane editor commands and scripting tools to be counter-productive, maybe because nobody showed me the light, or maybe because after 25 years of computer evolution we are justified to ask for a choice of more modern programming environments, complementing the command-line ones. Then again, it's not the tools, it's what you make with them...
Also, Borland has an excellent libary of RAD components, that ships along their Delphi, C++ and Java tools, and that in itself might be their greatest asset. Can anybody say _easy_ (if not _lazy_) database, internet, GUI apps? And I know from personnal experience that the Delphi community is a very fertile land for public component building and sharing. Now if you could get that community to cross the river, and to start working on an open-source OS like Linux, I bet that very interesting things could happen...
If Linux is poised to make it big, you're going to need tons of application developpers writing programs for it. And most of those guys (and gals) are for now working within Windows. I'm just thinking about all those junior VB-only programmers out there - from VB to gcc, now that's a _steep_ curve. I guess there is a great market oppportunity here: User friendly, powerful development tool required to ease the pain X many GUI developpers required to write apps = lots of money.
Nasal Cornfield "Oh. Yeah."
Re:Pascal/Delphi on Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Borland has said publicly that the Kylix project (port of C++ Builder and Delphi to Linux) is in the works and will ship in not too, too much longer.
This is very good news for Linux, all things considered, and I bet Redmond is none too happy with the news.
They can't afford it.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
ummm... Lotus is still part of IBM as I remember and making $$$ with notes Sybase even with the beating they have taken is still too big to swallow Adobe would cause anti-trust problems not to mention not being able to afford it...
No mention of gpl ...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
save only a passing note that corel developes an open source linux distribution.
Maybe corel realized that its distro needs an open source quattropro and db (paradox ?), and borland realized that corel would drop these two desktop cash cows if it did not play ball and stay in the corel suite, i.e. respond to market.
I just hope the new organization can foresee a change from the current policy of corel of mere credibility by open source to the wealth generating concept of the gpl.
Re:No mention of gpl ...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
corel only bought the front end of paradox. borland still owned the borland database engine (bde) that paradox ran off of.
Re:Effects of having multiple C compilers?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Actaully, the presence of additional C compilers on Linux and the other Freenixes might force the GCC people to start actually following standards, rather than engaging in their embrace-and-extend adventures.
But we'll have to see.
you bashed cli,
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I cast thy soul to hell, GUI loving demon! Intuitive GUI's are for stupid, stupid, windows users!
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Borland can add the first real development environment to linux. Hell, with Builder, development under linux will be just as good as anywhere else.
Believe it or not, there IS a world beyond editing make files and hand-crafting dialog boxes, and there are many big developers who greatly prefer it.
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
That is correct, though most if not all the topnotch programmers took the plane for Richmond a few years back. You can argue about it, but the Borland dev. products are not what they used to be, except maybe the JBuilder series, and look: Isn`t that latest version running on java - read: Linux ? How about that. On the other hand, everybody has the recent leave of top-employees at Netscape just before and after the AOL acquisition fresh in their mind. And I guess you are all running IE5, right ? Nuff said.. Ignace.
Re:Wow.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I think this is an interesting acquisition. One thing a lot of people have missed is that, when Kylix is out, Corel own a development tool that will allow them to build application for Linux and Windows at the same time. This using Kylix for Linux and Delphi/C++ Builder for Windows. The Windows environment makes a lot of money for them (especially the CorelDraw Suite I would imagine) and they are starting to move more towards the Linux market now. Makes sence to acquire a RAD development tool that will cover both. Of course, this is more of a long-term advantage. As for Inprise/Borland/Corelland(?), it maybe finally gives them the money to get those adds out. And, people, let's not forget that C++ Builder (which is the main reason I changed from Atari to WinTel) is made around a very C++ standard compliant compiler. And the signs are that this compiler (Borland C++ 5.5) will be free! Eric
Re:hm.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Corel-Inprise-Borland. Not a law office, more like the owner of an ocean going fleet of merchant ships. Or an oil exploration company.
Re:WTF?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Remember, Phillipe Kahn (sp?) almost drove Borland into the ground trying to be another Microsoft
Well, actually it was some things in his personal life, which may or may not be occuring now. Just run through the newspaper articles of the period. He, uh, was focused on things other than the day to day business.
It was an amazing company in its day. I still use Sidekick 1.0, not the cruddy Windows version. Porting Sidekick DOS would be cool.
I wonder what ever happened to ParadoxDOS? That was SQL, just field oriented. It is great, and it just screams on today's hardware. It can crosstab a table of 150,000 records in under 2 seconds.
Wonder if PdoxDOS will be resurrected - not interested in PWin with the awful ObjectPal, also known as AbjectPal because it was an abject disaster.
One word: Delphi
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
There is nothing available for Linux as good as Delphi, although ISE Eiffel comes close. Delphi is highly respected by language experts in the know, such as Jean Ichbiah designer of Ada. Delphi allows rapid development yet enforces good software engineering practices. In terms of speed of development and robust software, C++ is far behind.
Re:WTF?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Corel is nearly impossible to take over unless you manage to do it in a friendly way, and that would involve a rather big premium... They took several measures to create a "poison pill" to make them unattractive for unfriendly takeover a while back.
Besides, Corel is the one with the vision and leadership among the two, and with a far larger growth... Inprise has been in turmoil for years.
some thoughts....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
1. Inprise has some excellent products, particularly for the Linux market. Visibroker is a great vehicle for helping sell Linux in the enterprise market space. On top of that, JBuilder is a great IDE (for those who prefer such things - vi and make person here)
2. WordPerfect. Hmmmm. One thing Novell has touched and hasn't been completely ruined.
3. It's good to see new leadership at Inprise. They have been languishing for far too long. Anyone buy stock when it was at $2 and change?
Are we going to see any other Linux distros get more into the industrial-strength CORBA space (sorry ORBit, not there yet; MICO almost), with vendors like OOC, etc.?
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Actually, Corel has shown signs of increasing their share of the office products market on Windows lately, after they started marketing it more agressively, and lowered prices.
Re:Demergers?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Altavista was sold to CMGI
Re:This is good for the Linux Community
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
BSD: For people who doesn't understand that they don't have to upgrade with each new minor release.
I usually upgrade only when security problems are found (rarely), or the new kernel provide essential new features.
Re:But what do they get?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I guess you view "jumping on the Linux bandwagon" as a move of stregnth, while some of us view it as an act of desparation.
Re:Cowpland's fat ego
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Excuse me? Corel was at about USD 2,- a year ago. Now they are at about USD 20,-... A slight move?
Re:Oh no..
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Uh... Borland already "lost" their name... They changed their name to Inprise a long time ago.
I'm putting money on it!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I just bought some shares for my portfolio. --darkharlequin
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
inprise has delphi and its own java development environment to and it has a couple database things like paradox and such so its not just delphi and a C compiler thought your right the borlan C wouldn't be of any use since linux/unix already has a working C compiler but maybe they could port the ide there ide has some nice stuff like a C to asm translater (not of much use but still kind of cool).
The irony is...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Being an ex Corel employee, I can tell you that the irony of this whole deal is that Corel doesn't even use Borlands C++ compiler (does anyone?), they use Microsoft Visual C++.
You'd be even more surprised if you knew that Borland themselves use neither of their products. I'm not an ex-employee, tho. If wonder, just use your hex edit.
--
KuroiNeko
Blame Canada!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
This discussion isn't going to degenerate into Canada bashing, is it? For the record, as a Canadian, I have the following things to point out:
-the Canadian federal gov't has made considerable tax incentives available to companies who have a significant R&D presence (ala Nortel)
-there is a *huge* tax disparity between Canada and the US (ie, top tax bracket in Canada starts at approx. US$42,000, whereas in the US top tax bracket is US$285,000 - taken from John Roth interview somewhere)
-our Prime Minister insists that there is no "brain drain" (ie, smart people leaving Canada), if Canadian don't like the taxes, they can leave (yes, he actually said that)
-Currently, you have to pay capital gains tax on stock options if you excersize them even if you haven't sold them.
So, basically, I think Canada turns out a lot of smart people, but a lot of them leave the country because of the massive incentives available elsewhere. So, while I would love to live in California or Florida come January, I think there needs to be a wake up call to the Canadian fed. gov't. How about someone starting a "Save the Canadians" campaign:)
Not blaming Canada here, but if all the developers over in Scotts Valley start leaving because they don't like what's going on, then Borland will probably go the way of WordPerfect in the Windows world. Some may not care, some may.
Will Corel keep the American programmers, or shift everything up to Canada? I can garuantee people wont leave Scotts Valley for the Great and very cold White North.
Re:Dang.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
COWPLAND?
Is that a military acronym for Cow Pie Land?
Sounds like a lot of BS to me.
Corel-Caldera
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
As long as we're all having fun here, let's forecast the future by looking at the past.
WordPerfect romances Borland, but doesn't go all the way. They end up with Paradox and Quattro Pro.
Novell buys WordPerfect, in an attempt to go head to head with Microsoft.
Ray Noorda leaves Novell, but the Microsoft war path continues at Caldera.
Novell sells WordPerfect to Corel
Novell sells DR DOS to Caldera. Caldera licenses parts of Netware to develop Netware connectivity for Linux.
Corel buys Borland--err, Inprise--I mean Borland--no, Inprise. Well let's just call it all Corel now.
Caldera offers a strong business ditro of Linux.
Corel targets secretary-class non-techy users for its distro.
Next: Caldera buys Corel. There's a big family reunion. Caldera then offers an OpenLinux-Workstation ditribution with a bundled Corel Suite (or a Corel suite with a bundled distribution), and an OpenLinux-Server distribution--just like Microsoft. Development suite sold separately. Anti-MS activities coordinated through the former WordPerfect campus in Orem, UT.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ah, Corel. Who else would do garbage collection on the computer industry if they weren't around. Corel seems hell-bent on buying every once-great company that has been beaten into the ground by Microsoft. It's as if they aspire to remain a software underdog forever.
WordPerfect used to be a lovely word-processer, until Novell assimilated and sucked the blood from it. Microsoft Word began outselling it into the ground. Then Corel swooped in and bought it, and started selling it cheaply to college students.
Now Borland, a once-great compiler company, has fallen so far that even their name is no longer worth anything. May as well change it to Inprise or some other focus-group invented name. Their IDE is not as good as Microsoft's and not as many people use Delphi as use Visual Basic. Hey, why not have Corel swoop in and buy them out?
What's next? Compuserve?
I admire Corel for wanting to provide consumer apps and tools for Linux, and for promoting Linux with Yet Another Distribution, but does anyone else get the feeling that we are witnessing the birth of the world's largest Shovelware company?
Corel -- All your favorite has-beens under one corporate roof(tm)! (We also created Linux)
Re:Corel -- Underdog Forever
by
TheKodiak
·
· Score: 1
"Their IDE is not as good as Microsoft's and not as many people use Delphi as use Visual Basic."
I hope to god this is just a troll, and that no one believes that this statement has any meaning. More people use AOL than Linux. More people use COBOL than Visual Basic. More people use condoms than ML. (Ok, I made that last one up. No idea what the actual statistics on that are.)
At any rate, speaking as someone whose first Windows development experience came with Visual C++ 1.52c, I've got to say that Delphi is my favorite Win32 development app. I (re)learned Pascal to use Delphi.
-- -=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
CNBC interviews Inprise/Corel CEOs Linux Publicity
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
At about 12:30 pm CST today, CNBC TV had a live interview from New York with the CEOs of Corel and Inprise. Wow, lots and lots of terrific plugs for Linux. In fact it was *all* about Linux. "Linux is the future", "Linux is low cost", "we will be providing the migration tools from Windows to Linux", and on and on. Man, that is great advertising, especially since TV CNBC's prime audience is corporate suits and investors. A lot of them who hadn't thought about Linux before, will sure be thinking about it now. Great going Corel and Inprise!
Re:Canadian buys Yank
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Well, it has happened before. Consider Nortel's takeover of Bay Networks.
Re:Distribution Wars.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I would think they should be able to abstract out whether QT or GTK (or even straight Athena-based or Xt-based), for the most part. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it can be done via CORBA... I hope it does not mean that COM/DCOM, MFC, and other Microsoft "innovations" are coming soon to a Linux near you, nor that Delphi on Linux becomes tightly bound to WP...
Re:Little MS is born
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
shhhh, its okay little one.. Big bad Corel wont hurt you anymore.. Micro(soft)mommie is here to keep you safe
Re:This is good for the Linux Community
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You f'ing pedant.
Borland sued Microsoft after MS raided the Delphi development team awhile back, around Delphi 3 days. We're talking serious flaunting of money, not leaving them alone, etc. Look how closer to Delphi VB is rather than the other way around.
It seems like Microsoft did step over the lines a little bit.
MS 10% inprise stake a trojan horse?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Most of focus has been on whether Corel as Linux Powerhouse will be good for Linux. Let's assume it is. What about the 10% stake of MS in Inprise. Inprise owns 44% Corel post merger, so it owns 4.4.% of new Corel post merger. Is this a Trojan Horse. Maybe this is their Linux strategy in the near term. Hedge their bets . If Linux becomes big, they have a peice of the action. If it gets really big, they buy Corel. I am less concerned about Corel becoming a major linux player than I am about MS coming along for the ride. Like some tropical pest hiding in a freight shipment of Bannanas. Penguins can fly
Re:Ummm.....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
They also make an Internet appliance / Server box but I think they sell it thru a subsidiary Rebel.com
Re:Beware of Corel
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I doubt Corel will want to dominate a market already dominated by RedHat... However...RedHat can't even make a better user interface to install itself onto a given system without choking. They had to use Caldera's Lizard and they STILL botched it. Stupid RH6.1 didn't even see my Ensoniq PCI sound card. Nevertheless, Corel can't open source the compiler. It wouldn't be in their interest. I'd shell out money for a GUI IDE to start cloning Mickeysoft products to Linux to attract more users, hence, giving developer and incentive to make more programs for Linux, hence, making everyone more money. =] Everything doesn't HAVE to be FREE or OPEN to reap the rewards. That's just a copout for cheap tightwaded people or for the wannabe's that can't get real jobs. I honestly think saying, "Beware of Corel," is more or less paranoia based on the experiences with Microsoft. I'd be more afraid of RedHat not doing any further development to make Linux more user friendly so all of us can make cheap Greeting Card Makers for $10 a pop so mom and dad can make neat things to mail out to relatives across the street. =]
Re:Is Corel "Serious" about Linux?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I'm another old fart who remembers Borland fondly. I learned to program with Turbo Pascal and went on to make good bucks churning out Paradox apps. They blew the port of Paradox to Windows disastrously but got back in my good graces with the brilliant debut of Delphi. They then proceeded to bloat it and overprice it outrageously. As to Linux, I gave Red Hat a good try but finally threw up my hands in despair at ever getting it to work well. I so wanted it to succeed for me. My guess is this merger will end up with Borland fading away for good and Corel losing itself in a lost focus never-never land. Right now I'd put my money on Mac OSX being the Unix-based OS that will succeed in stealing (a bit) of market share from Microsloth.
Hehe
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You know what is next...
Re:Distribution Wars.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Borland brand of tools *WILL NOT* be tied directly to any particular distribution. - Borland Developer
Re:Why the drop?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Maybe the market remembers how Cowpland totally screwed up the WP merger. That was practically the death of the company. This is exactly the same mistake they made before. Now their basically taking two dying technology companies, calling them linux companies, merging them, and trying to create something that can breath on its own. I'm not buying it. RedHat made a much better buy in cygnus for development tools IMHO. RedHat is pure linux play, where Corel is trying to ride the wave but is being pulled under by a history the preceeds Linux.
> The catch here is that Delphi is highly dependent on the Windows API. It is going to be very interesting to see what Corel does in order to make the port. They may have to invent their own desktop. Don't forget Borland is devloping a version of Delphi and C++Builder for Linux. It is codenamed Kylix and supposed to be out around the end of summertime.
Nope you are wrong.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Delphi and C++ Builder do share the same backend compiler. The front end compiler is different in the two products. - Borland Developer
Borland lives! Inrpise is Dead!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The name of the Borland Devesion will be Borland. We are dropping the Inprise name.
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
"As far as I know, all that Borland has which sells at all is some development tools, which are slowly getting hammered by MS in the Windows market." Except for Borland C++ for OS/2 for which Borland burned the manuals, ground up the disks, wiped the hard drives, and denys to this day that it ever existed. Probably they did this because it didn't sell very well...right? NOT!
Re:It's called being sent down to the minor league
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
When your company can't survive the competitive Windows market..
Shouldn't that be "monopolized" Windows market?
I thought it would be "monopolised" Windows market.
But back to the topic, if Inprise can make Kylix work, Linux may get the major backing it really needs, and deserves to make it a viable alternative to M$
IBM to update OS/2 Warp client
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
There are certain news in life that make you very happy. This is one of them. For about 10 years, OS/2 has been dead. And yet, IBM has decided to update the OS/2 Warp client once more. It's all about business. IBM made $92 millions last year with the sale of OS/2 (how much did RedHat loose?) and the show will go on. Here is the link: http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/news/0,4538,243412 0,00.html
Re:don't forget the MS bag of Dirty Tricks(tm)
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
MS Settled the lawsuit out of Court for an undisclosed sum.
Re:WTF?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1
Corel is just buying more distressed "hand me down" products from another failed business (Borland). They're starting to look like a second-hand "thrift" store.
I *really* don't understand this
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
Borland?
The makers of kick-ass development tools, that has (sadly) been in decline for the past few years?
Development tools? On Linux? That's always been Linux's greatest strength. Borland is like the _last_ company I'd expect a company that wants to be a Linux Power to aqquire.
I mean, how about:
- Adobe (Photoshop, font tech, PS/PDF, DTP tools) - NewTek (Lightwave, an awesome 3D production tool) - Sybase/Oracle (industrial strength DBMS) - Lotus (123, Notes)
These make sense. But Borland?
The only reason I can see for buying Borland is that it's a good way to get a bing chunk of programmers all at once. But there's nothing I see attractive in the product line
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
Daniel
·
· Score: 2
I *did* try to use C++ builder, "try" being the operative word. I still haven't figured out what the point is..or for that matter, how to compile a simple program. Mind, I haven't tried particularly hard since I stopped using Windows soon after I bought it (waste of $100, but anyway..)
Daniel
-- Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
Daniel
·
· Score: 2
After seeing this article I decided to check out Glade, and it looks like it does pretty much the same thing, only it has the advantage of having documentation that makes sense:) Also, you can export the interfaces to XML and (I think) dynamically load them back in, adding a lot of customizability; does C++ Builder do this? (shouldn't be hard) There are a few UI annoyances; for example, if you select a widget and then place it, the next click will revert to "select" mode instead of placing another widget of that type, but those are easy to deal with (if I ever am in a position where Glade could help, I may send a short patch -- probably no more than 10 lines -- to the Glade folks to fix this)
Anyway, I'm obviously pretty ignorant about "visual" design; I've only tried to write one Windows program, and did it with very little assistance (I did use some buggy Borland dialog creation tool -- a resource editor, I think they called it). It was an enormous pain. I think the complexity and hackiness of the Windows API may be a major reason for the popularity of this sort of tool over there. If I want to write a UNIX GUI program, I generally use GTK+. If I want to write it quickly, I use GTK+ in Python. The API for GTK+ is logical and consistent enough that I'm not sure that GUI drawing tools aren't redundant -- except for the rather cool dynamic-loading and design-by-nonprogrammer aspect I mentioned earlier.
Daniel
-- Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
perfecto
·
· Score: 1
I *did* try to use C++ builder, "try" being the operative word. I still haven't figured out what the point is..or for that matter, how to compile a simple program. Mind, I haven't tried particularly hard since I stopped using Windows soon after I bought it (waste of $100, but anyway..)
this has been a major annoyance to me lately. i dont know when borland started doing this but they have gotten into the nasty habit of trying to force their project structure down your throat. the reason i loved borland products before is that i could whip up and debug plain code in seconds. with jbuilder you have to make a project and you can't uninclude.java (during compilation) from the project if they are in the same directory as your project. with delphi, the ability to write a from scratch console apps is buried. i still love delphi but that pisses me off. they were alot better when they gave the programmer some credit.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
Foogle
·
· Score: 2
There's no reason to think that Borland's RAD IDE could not be ported to work with GCC. The IDE is essentially the same with C++ Builder, and that works just fine as a C++ frontend.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
mbyte
·
· Score: 1
Well.. then please show me a RAD-GUI developement tool like delphi or their c++builder with database connectivity, CORBA, etc.
The only I know are : - vdkbuilder (looks promising, but MUCH work to do) - kdevelop (did not try that one) - gide (uhm... dead ?)
EMACS/VI may be nice for experineced hackers, but for most people its really not the answer. Go try and use delphi or c++ builder for a while, you really going to miss at least some of its features in EMACS:)
regards, Michael
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
sydj
·
· Score: 1
Kick-ass development tools yes. Kick-ass visual development tools no.
Kdevelop is very good but doesn't feel as polished as Delphi or JBuilder. The others aren't really finished yet.
If Borland's IDE/debugger frontend is bolted onto GCC (I really hate Object Pascal) then I'll be a happy man. It could be to Linux what VB was/is to Windows.
Having said that, the VB IDE is even better, no matter what you think of the language. But that's an aside...
Re:I *really* don't understand this
by
ZZane
·
· Score: 1
In my experience C++ Builder is just as easy to use as VB. You drag and drop controls onto forms, hit run and viola, it works. The best part about C++ Builder is that it combines the ease of use of VB with a powerfull and flexible language like C++. In my opinion C++ Builder is what MS Visual C should always have been.
That said I think the major benefit of Corel buying Inprise is that both companies are working heavily on Linux products. In my eyes this combined effort will do nothing but speed up development of good Linux applications and tools. This can be nothing but good for the Linux community.
If C++ Builder is ported as I believe it will be we'll finally have a powerfull, easy to use GUI development tool for X under Linux. People will be able to develope applications under Linux/X just as easily as under Windows. If Inprise puts some effort into it then C++ Builder projects might be cross platform compatible without any code changes.
On the other hand I've seen Inprise repeatedly stop short of a viable enterprise product and just say "We're done". For instance C++ Builder cannot read COFF libraries (MSVC format libraries) but MSVC can read OMF format libraries (C++ Builder's format) with no problem. The major problem with this is that 90+% of the SDK's out there use COFF format libraries and have no OMF format equivilant. This makes C++ Builder useless in a good deal of Enterprise projects. Also C++ Builder is a C++ development tool and if you purchase the Entrpise package the source for all the visual tools comes with it, but the source is in Object Pascal. It doesn't take much effort to convert this source to C++ but it makes the tool look very shoddy from an enterprise standpoint (why should my programmers have to learn object pascal to use a C++ product?). Given that last part is only a problem if you have/want to modify the visual components, but I have found bugs that required changes to visual components themselves and spent hours porting to C++.
Anyhow, if Inprise overcomes these hurdles we could see a huge increase in the amount and quality of tools/applications produced for Linux/X. Regardless they come out with C++Builder for Linux I'll buy it no matter what it's flaws may be.
-E.J. Wilburn
-- This sig is worse than my last.
Re:Pascal/Delphi on Linux
by
Dave+Fiddes
·
· Score: 1
There are currently two Open Source pascal projects:
- Free Pascal: Written in itself, has a lot of extensions over "standard" Pascal which bring it _close_ to Borland Pascal. Available for a few non-x86 platforms. - GNU Pascal: Written as a language front-end to GCC(GNU Compiler Collection;) so can target virtually any platform that GNU C can and is highly optimising. Supports a wide variety of Pascal standards. Somewhat compliant with Borland Pascal.
Neither of these compilers are in the same league as Borland Delphi. They are both staggeringly slow compared with the Borland compilers (OK, I can forgive GNU Pascal as it shares exactly the same back end as GCC). Neither compiler has adopted many Delphi-isms - which is good if you want a Borland Pascal look-a-like but lousy if you have 100k+ lines of Delphi (like me;). Both compilers are cross-platform and cross-processor which is a Good Thing(tm).
When I looked at trying to improve these projects back in 96/97 the developers seemed less than enthusiastic about adopting Delphi constructs... YMMV.
Hmm... Given the existence of GCC, maybe they will open source or drop the compiler, and sell the IDE only instead.
I hope not. The Borland compiler has a lot of advantages, the main one being speed. The Delphi 4 compiler will build my 100k line application from scratch in around 60sec on a PII-233+192MB RAM. An equivalent sized C application can take ~10mins (under Linux - much much more under Windows/Cygwin)....
GCC however is highly portable and can target many platforms and processors. Which is really neat....but you don't need (or want) an IDE to do that. Autoconf/Automake is your friend;)
Yes, I know that sometimes all those mergers make me want to get down on my knees too, but unfortunately, I'm straight, male, and have to get to class now.
Later. Good luck getting out of the karma hole with your new account, "Daren Brantley". --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you can always use RHIDE, (looks like a Borland product, in text mode, yay!) FreePascal, (pretty complete, not quite there last I checked. But back then it was FPK Pascal or something) and NASM. (looks kinda like TASM, for those of us who don't want to learn AT&T-style Assembler syntax, for one.)
Oh, and feel free to port the BGI interface. I ported some of it to SVGALib, so I could move my graphics hacks over. Of course, I used p2c, and hacked the output some, and compiled with egcs, but it's all good. And my stuff runs much better now. I just wish SVGALib had more primitives, like "floodfill"... *sigh* --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, that's what happens when you turn a C compiler into a C++ compiler. However, that's actually not nearly as bad as some implementations I've seen, believe it or not.
Centerline's old "C++ compiler" didn't support boolean variables, true or false. I had to ifdef / define the darn things if I wanted to use them.
I'm not convinced that strong typing is a benefit, unless you can override it when necessary. However, I guess it helps catch errors if you know what types you want, and want speed. Lately, I've been using languages with pretty flexible types, and implementing something that *looks* like that in C++ is a real pain.
(pardon me while I override the + operator so it supports every combination of anything addition-like for every type, ever.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, the environment is definitely a separate chunk that can be made to work with the compiler(s). That's one thing I like about RHIDE.
I don't know how much of a market there would be for an X RAD tool, but I understand there are such things for FLTK and GTK. (?) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
How did you misinterpret my post as adoration for GCC? I just use it a lot.
GCC actually optimizes things decently on Intel, and your problems did not concern optimization, but rather scale. And I've seen worse C++ compilers, but GCC definitely does better as a C compiler. It also has a lot of unique flags to tune its behavior in both C and C++, which is a really good thing to investigate.
Also, last I checked, GCC optimization sucks on Solaris, and probably a few other platforms. But again, that wasn't even what you were talking about. (I think) Also, it's nice that GCC supports so many platforms, and allows its users to extend it. That's really its strength, and also why we have Linux in the first place.
But when I wrote some classes that used templates, I had to #include my.cc files to get it to work. Bleh.
Also, I agree, RHIDE for Linux is pretty buggy. But the original, RHIDE for DOS is much better. (and it runs in DOSEmu. Go figure) Also, I *love* its info browser. That is a wonderful idea, making it just like the Borland Help. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe we *will* get to see all that Borland stuff ported to Linux. I hope Corel follows through on their good intentions.
Have we seen some little companies grow up and buy some big companies, or what? Compaq and Digital, AOL and Time Warner, and now this. It boggles the mind... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There was one really nasty thing of this nature in 2.7.2 (I think it finally got fixed in 2.9 something). Compiling C++, a function
foo(int a) { }
was accepted. Notice that there is no declaration of return type -- a violation of every C++ standard -- and the compiler defaults to returning int, K&R-style. Even including -ansi -pedantic-errors would not trigger an error (it would trigger a warning, but not an error). I had a very hard time convincing the gcc folks at the time that this was a real, and serious, problem.
I'm glad that at least -ansi -pedantic-errors exists; for the most part, it's quite good. It's unfortunate that something as egregious as this (and in C++, where one of the major benefits is strong typing, this kind of thing is a real problem) slipped through for so long.
Rhide has major problems, if you go a bit too fast during tracing you get core dumps. I've had the same results under Slackware, RedHat and SuSE.
gdb may be the guilty one but being integrated into rhide it's hard to be happy with either one of them.
I was degugging my code with it and got sick of it and went to OS/2 to do the debugging with a real debugger.
To make things worst, the support for fonts is almost as bad as on winblows. Winblows is OK until the screen turns green or I get a page fault. Under Linux I get garbage around the edges of the screen when I use a decent font. To see something acceptable only a few useless OEM fonts can be used, if I use those stupid fonts I can't see the accents in my French or Spanish texts.
When Borland comes aboard Linux it'll be a dream to debug code under Linux.
Somehow Borland got to me way back in the days of CPM/80 and the love affair has never died.
There was Turbo Pascal, then Turbo C then Turbo C++ and then Borland C++.
It's not the compiler as such, just the environment. I've used Delphi in various versions, and am using C++Builder to learn C++, and they are great environments for flinging graphical applications together. Do you _really_ want to spend your time calling window handles? Or do you want to leave that to the RAD tool and get on with coding the cool engine?
Sure, if all you want to do is write device drivers, or hack kernel code, then these are not the tools for you. But if you want to put a nifty X interface on that cool config tool, the Linux tools are going to be a great improvement.
they have or are already porting most of their stuff, jbuilder, visibroker and their database (dont remember its name) has already been ported and they are currently porting delphi and c builder
Corel is attempting to create a new market for non-technical Linux users for their office application with their distribution. This is a totally different market than the Borland development tools are attracting. Thus, I don't think tying the development tools to their distribution would make any economic sense.
AT&T into AT&T + NCR + Lucent Technologies (n/t)
by
Per+Abrahamsen
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I was thinking about the Borland C/C++ compiler only, which is what is most clearly equivalent to GCC. I use both Borland C++ 5.0 and the GCC from Cygwin 1.0, and GCC generates 10% faster code. GNU ld, on the other hand, uses way to much memory (1 Gb for my project), and the debug information takes ridiculous amount of space. Linking is also a weak point for Borland C++.
Delphi is very different, GCC doesn't include a Pascal compiler yet, and as you say, the Delphi compiler is much faster. I agree dropping it for an alpha version of GNU Pascal would be ridiculous.
We already have lcc, another free C compiler (n/t)
by
Per+Abrahamsen
·
· Score: 1
lcc doesn't have as many backends or frontends as gcc, but it should be a nice little C compiler.
Precompiled header support was developed by Cygnus, but apparently there was issues with the implementation, so it was never merged into gcc. Cygnus has now (sub-)contracted the job to a new person, who apparently work directly with the public gcc tree, rather than the internal Cygnus sources.
Corel has until now been a user and (indirectly, through Cygnus contracts) a developer of GCC. They have paid Cygnus to implement various MS extensions for GCC, as well as support for precompiled headers. I hope this move does not mean they will use (and enhance) the proprietary Borland compilers instead.
Hmm... Given the existence of GCC, maybe they will open source or drop the compiler, and sell the IDE only instead.
I was under the impression that gcc still didn't do this. Since I've got some rather large bits of C++ code that I compile fairly often, I'd be interested in activating this feature if it works. Do you have more information?
Thanks, Daniel
-- Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Corel/Borland: proprietary invasion to Linux?
by
Andy+Tai
·
· Score: 1
Now Corel and Borland are merging, they seem to show their true intentions: to use Linux as a weapon in the market share grabbing game against Microsoft. Linux to them is just a money-making tool, in some ways not different from the case of LinuxOne. They either ignore or forget about the true significance of Linux and Open Source. Trying to sell their compilers and GUI frameworks to Linux users and to control the market, thinking that these areas are currently vacant? Just imagine if Borland requires that all Linux systems shall have some Borland library installed, or applications built with Borland won't run. Or a Borland installer requires root privileges, or installs over standard library files (like the C library). Coral/Borland shall realize that since GNU C was released in 1989, the hackers have been freed from proprietary domination. And they won't go back. They are not Windows programmers. Trying to play the same game as they did in Windows land (one vendor for everything from compilers to office suites, all proprietary), and Corel/Borland will die sooner before the advancement of Open Source.
Redhat and VA Linux are the future of computer companies. Corel/Borland is not.
-- Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Since Borland has 2.5 times Corel's revenues I'm not too worried about the dilution.
Is Corel "Serious" about Linux?
by
planet_hoth
·
· Score: 1
For all those who thought Corel might not be fully committed to the Linux platform, this should serve as proof otherwise. It would seem that Corel is betting the farm on this one, and it'll be interesting to see how it works out after the dust has settled.
I for one am rooting for them. Hopefully they will keep raising the bar in the ease-of-use dept., pushing Red Hat and the other distros to continue to improve their product, too.
Speaking of Red Hat, I wonder if this was a "pre-emptive" buyout. If I were Corel, I would have harbored concerns that Red Hat, flush with cash, might have picked up Inprise/Borland themselves sooner or later. Not sure how that would have hurt Corel, though; just a thought.
First it was the graphics apps... Then they bought the Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, etc.
Most of these companies which Corel is buying are ones which Microsoft has passed on. Borland was the major IDE competitor before Visual 'x' surpassed them. Wordperfect was the #1 Wordprocessor before Lotus was killed and Word bundled Excel.
To spare the usual Anti-Microsoft rant, Corel has not been leveraging an OS to manipulate their competition.
Corel/Inprise is now doing something interesting and exciting on a cool platform. I hope the quality of their software reflects the talent they should be attracting.
Boosting WINE, and working on a common printing environment are noble spinoffs.
Re:Effects of having multiple C compilers?
by
stripes
·
· Score: 1
Actaully, the presence of additional C compilers on Linux and the other Freenixes might force the GCC people to start actually following standards, rather than engaging in their embrace-and-extend adventures.
Actually as far as C goes GCC is really quite standards conforming. It supports tri-graphs, and lots of icky things that not all C compilers do. It has a lot of extensions, but all of them can be disabled by passing "-ansi -pendantic".
Of corse some of those disbleable extensions are now part of the recently-approved C99 standard, but GCC has more work to go on that front.
If you want to talk about C++ then that's another matter. A pretty mixed bag in fact. For example it was the first known C++ compiler to have exception support. It was also almost the last to enable that support by default (only turning it on within the last year!!).
Again it has a pile of extensions, again you can disable them all with the flick of a switch or two.
I don't see that adding more compilers to the mix will make GCC ditch any extensions, in fact I expect it will grab a few from the other compilers (some mix of the "best", most useful, most popular, and easyest to re-implment). It can't halp the "standardness" of the C implmentation, but it might give the C++ front-end a boost.
P.S. alot of the C++ extensions were added after much discussion in comp.lang.c++ about new pontental features. Some became standard, others, like typeof() should have, yet others have languished as they deserve.
Think about it for a minute - what products does Corel offer? Well first it was a Word processor/Business suite. Next they put together an OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system. Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's product mix.
Sure seems that MS is settting up to compete with MS across the spectrum.
That would be insightful, but since Corel already owns Paradox, the Microsoft product mix thing is a little late. Corel did the development language thing much earlier with their whole netwinder experiment. Along with the OS thing when they tried their javaOS thing too.
Effects of having multiple C compilers?
by
sector
·
· Score: 3
This brings up some interesting scenarios...
As software tools companies port their compilers to Linux, we risk getting into a situation similar to what exists in the Windows world...where there are a number of compilers available, each with its own quirks, libraries and special features.
Right now, go to metalab and download the source code for the linux app of your choice. It's a pretty safe bet that the app developer used the same compiler that you're using -- gcc. Possibly a different compiler version but same compiler essentially. Barring any incompatibilities between expected compiler versions or maybe kernel versions, you can be pretty sure that the app will build with little or no porting effort on your part.
In the Windows world, where you have compiler suites available from Microsoft, IBM, Watcom and Borland, just to name a few, it's not a given assumption that source code you download will even build in your environment. For instance, consider an app that's written to use the IBM OpenClass libraries...you'll have fun building it in a Microsoft Visual C++ environment. So even though the app itself might be open source, you're stuck installing pre-compiled binary version of it because you're unable to build the app yourself.
Let's hope this doesn't happen in the Linux community.
Re:Effects of having multiple C compilers?
by
warmi
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, Watcom C++ is no more... Borland is not being used so the only option is VC++ ( and 90% of the code available for Windows APIs will compile with MS compiler)
Re:Effects of having multiple C compilers?
by
mbyte
·
· Score: 1
I think this will have MORE effect on toolkits, than on c compilers. Borland's c compiler is not THAT far from gcc from my point of view, but with a GUI Designer of that class the "toolkit wars" could be over very fast.
regards, Michael
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
Octavian
·
· Score: 1
Borland/Inprise _was_ a successfull company some time ago. For me Turbo Pascal was the first programming language i learned on my PC and so it was for lots of user guys i know of. However, times have changed, AFAIK they have some difficult years, losses, freeing some staff. Why do you think they changed their name from Borland to Inprise, out of nothing?
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
lithis
·
· Score: 1
there are/have been more than three office suites. there's star office, there was one given away free in magazine by some russian team, and i'm sure there are others i'm forgetting.
There always seems to be some sort of merger or acquisition going on in the software industry. But have there been any important demergers? (Apart from the mother of all demergers which might happen soon, depending on what the DOJ and courts decide.)
Microsoft spinning off Expedia (I don't know if it's happened yet). There's been talk for years of AltaVista being spun off, although I don't think that it has ever happened. Oracle said that they were going to spin off a Linux network computer unit, although I haven't heard anything about it in months.
Yes there are demergers too. For Example Hewlett-packard/Agilent stuff. Nokia has splitted away practicaly all lines except for the mobile phones. (Nokia was known in the 80's of its rubber boots...)
-- signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
Sgi bought Cray a few years ago. They are now trying to split it off and sell it to someone else.
--
Be insightful.
If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Darkstorm
·
· Score: 1
And according to Borland, the Linux port of delphi (which by the way is already being worked on) will include its own widget set (vcl clone) that will make the linux version of delphi more portable from windows. I doubt it will be perfect, but if you can carry 75% or more of your current work over...makes life allot easier.
I know I'll be first in line to get it. I'll even pay for it.
-- If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
I wrote a microcontroller C Compiler in C++, a huge program. The code compiled perfectly under OS/2 and winblows with IBM Visual Age for C++ and Borland C++. (Dos with Borland only)
When I went to convert it to work under Linux GCC would generate core dumping code until I limited the number of virtual functions I had.
I also had to cut my modules in 3 or 4 pieces because GCC would barf, the code being too big. GCC under Dos generates a file that is about 3 times large than that generated by either Borland or IBM Visual for C++.
I would advise you to rethink your adoration of GCC. It may not be a bad compiler but it is not the best by a long shot, it is the only one under Linux that is readily available. It's optimization sucks big time.
Comeau C++ which is a good C++ Compiler but you still need to use GCC. I use GCC because I don't have a choice but whenever Borland C++ and/or IBM Visual Age for C++ are available for Linux I will not hesitate for one minute to buy either one of them.
One thing I don't think you understand is...
by
CRConrad
·
· Score: 1
Foogle writes:
There's no reason to think that Borland's RAD IDE could not be ported to work with GCC.
Yes there is: GCC probably lacks Borland's proprietary extended-C++ keyword _property, don't you think?
The IDE is essentially the same with C++ Builder, and that works just fine as a C++ frontend.
"Frontend"?!? C++ Builder is no mere "frontend", AFAICS: It's integrated [TM Microsoft...;^] with the compiler; it depends on the _property keyword, can't work its magic without it.
Christian R. Conrad MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
--
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
Re:Adobe's not for sale
by
Pig+Hogger
·
· Score: 1
Quark tried to take over Adobe a year and a half ago.
Yeah, but given Quirk's snotty snobbish attitude, it's a good thing they weren't able to get Adobe. -- "It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky"
One of the more amusing aspects of this is that Quattro, which is the spreadsheet portion of the Corel Wordperfect Suite, was originally a Borland product, back when they made office applications. I was acutaslly a big fan of Borland's apps, back in the DOS days. They had a kick-butt wordprocessor called Sprint that had a full-out EMACS emulation mode, and a very powerful macro language. It died, unlike Quattro,which was spun off to some other company (not sure if it was Corel directly).
Hmm... I think I may still have a copy of Borland's DOS version of Quattro... And, of course, Turbo-C totally rocked my world back in the day.
Sad how the mighty have fallen, but maybe they'll do better in the Linux market.
Corel played the game better
by
SurfsUp
·
· Score: 2
Borland went toe to toe with Microsoft and lost badly (I'm not saying the fight was fair). They never really recovered from that. Corel did the same thing, but were smart enough to know when to retreat - to the high ground of Linux. Otherwise, they would have been creamed just like Borland, antitrust trial or no antitrust. The markets apparently agree - while Corel's stock is no rocket, it's certainly done well this year and seems to have a lot more support than in the past.
Now, the best thing Corel could do with Inprise nee Borland would be to hurry along the release of Delphi - a lot of programmers are waiting for Delphi to show up on LInux before then finally defect from Windows. For such people (I know several personally) Linux will only be be seen as a real platform when it runs Delphi.
-- Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
dalraun
·
· Score: 1
- It's easy to be one of the three most popular office suites when there are only three on the WinTel platform.
Actually, according to the CEO of Nortel Networks, if I recall correctly, up until late 1998, the majority of buyouts were Canadian companies buying American ones.
Just hope they don't decide to relocate the 'Corporation' to the U.S. due to staffing consolidation and other 'corporate' issues!!! Most companies, once 'Internationalized' forget about borders and such 'Nationalistic foolishness'. Which has the better facilities? Tax benefits/breaks? Nicer weather? I hear Scotts Valley, CA is very nice this time of year.
Ignoring the fact that I like to think Corel is a company that does have good intentions, it simply wouldn't make sense for them to make it Corel Linux only. Sure it would boost the Corel Linux market share some, but I imagine they'd take a much larger hit in loss of sales from people who a) refuse to buy from a company that looks like it's trying to become the microsoft of the linux world and b) refuse to give up their current distro just so they can use some app that isn't really needed. I honeslty doubt they'd try to pull something like this. Also, I imagine if the ports do lean to one desktop/toolkit it will be kde/qt as they are used heavily in Corel Linux. Just a guess.
--
-matt
Corel stocks drops on the news
by
bray
·
· Score: 1
Historically any time one company buys another the stock of the buyer drops and the buyee goes up. So this was to be expected.
I'm holding out though. I've got around $7K tied up on Corel stock right now. I think they are ripe to be acquired themselves. They have development tools, their own office suite, and their own distribution. My gut tells me that a Red Hat or VA equivalent is going to snatch them up soon.
---This routine borders on black magic. Touch it at your own peril. ________________________________________________ _____________________
-- "The code I write borders on black magic. Modify it at your own peril."
Re:Corel stocks drops on the news
by
hedgehog_uk
·
· Score: 2
I really can't see Red Hat buying Corel. RH already has development tools from Cygnus and, of course, a popular distro. Why should they buy more of the same (except to get an office suite)?
VA buying Corel would maybe make more sense. I suspect strongly that VA wants to make the big league (and I think they will) and Corel could help them achieve this. However having a distribution, tools, apps etc. tied to a single hardware vendor might not be such a good idea.
I think that (unlike RedHat), Corel is maybe aiming at being the M$ of Linux. Whether this would benefit or hinder Linux remains to be seen. I guess that now would be a great time to be a Linux startup with a good product - you could sell up to RedHat, Corel or VA and make a fortune.
HH
-- Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes. She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
Re:Corel stocks drops on the news
by
LunarOne
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention the fact that RH is much smaller than Corel.
--
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
I wonder if this means that the forthcoming port of Delphi / C++ Builder will lean to GTK / Gnome? Or, worse yet, will be Corel Linux only? That'd be very annoying.
However, that would be an obvious marketing advantange. They would have an OS, Office Suite, AND Development Environments all designed to work together under their OS. It could be really scary if they started doing that, but i don't believe they have the market share just yet, thankfully
Ack! Sounds just like M$! Naw, there will be some requirements (probably graphical libs). But I would doubt they would get into the same pickle jar as M$. Let's trust them to do the right thing.
However, that would be an obvious marketing advantange. They would have an OS, Office Suite, AND Development Environments all designed to work together under their OS. It could be really scary if they started doing that, but i don't believe they have the market share just yet, thankfully
Ack! Sounds just like M$! Naw, there will be some requirements (probably graphical libs). But I would doubt they would get into the same pickle jar as M$. Let's trust them to do the right thing. RD
That's a very interesting point: What if they do release it for Corel Linux only? I don't think they could really enforce that without special checks to make sure it is running under Corel Linux. But for now the best they could do to make it Corel Linux only is to only provide support for the products if they are running under Corel Linux. Which could make sense for them because they won't have to support all the various distributions of linux, only theirs.
However, that would be an obvious marketing advantange. They would have an OS, Office Suite, AND Development Environments all designed to work together under their OS. It could be really scary if they started doing that, but i don't believe they have the market share just yet, thankfully.
I'm sure there's a few other issues I'm forgetting, I don't claim to be an expert on these topics, but this is just what I thought about the whole situtation.
However, that would be an obvious marketing advantange. They would have an OS, Office Suite, AND Development Environments all designed to work together under their OS. MMM, didn't Microsoft get their butts in a sling for doing the same thing? Maybe Corel can get away with it since they are a Canadian Company.
ignorance reigns triumphant
by
wmeyer
·
· Score: 1
As so often happens, Linux folk seem to be unaware of the realities of non-Linux software and software companies. 1. Inprise, while no M$, is certainly not dying. 2. Interbase is, in fact, in widespread use in enterprise level and embedded applications. 3. The Java IDE may or may not be inferior to that of IBM, but IBM has an abysmal performance record at marketing good software, or of remaining committed to it. Remember OS2?
No, you don't get it. Real commercial software products are not built by macho C programmers who refuse to use a RAD tool, but by programmers who select tools for the productivity they provide, and for the ease of production of solid programs.
Visual environments, for the most part, make the programming of the UI a task so formidable that it dwarfs tha actual application code in many cases. Delphi, C++ Builder, and JBuilder all put the UI development where it belongs: in a simple and quick IDE which lets the programmer focus on coding application code, not UI code.
My only concern with this deal is that Corel may lessen the commitment to continued support for the Windows development language tools. You do remember Windows, don't you? It's that OS which many of us pragmatists do hate, but which still dominates the desktop market.
WP peaked at 5.1 for DOS, which was an unmitigated piece of crap with a horribly inconsistent and byzantine set of function keys. The show codes function which I always heard praised was there because they never figured out how to clean up after themselves.
WP was, at least through the 6.1 version for Windows, a horrible, bug-ridden disaster which I used only under extreme duress.
Not that Word is the holy grail, either. Actually, the single most productive word processing tool I have ever used was Borland Sprint.
-- ---
Bill
Re:This is good for the Linux Community
by
Mr.+Piccolo
·
· Score: 1
OH SHUT UP ALREADY!
You don't like it, leave. You know what he/she meant.
-- Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Corel has been around as long as I can remember. Back when I was coding in Turbo C++ 1.0 for DOS, I was also using CorelDraw. And before CorelDraw, Corel was into SCSI drivers and stuff.
Well, then that's your problem. Don't come whining to us about it.
Unless you're trying to be a parody, in which case it didn't come off too well...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
-- It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
aphrael
·
· Score: 1
Ironically enough, a good part of Corel's office suite came from Borland originally --- Paradox and Quattro Pro were both Borland products that got sold to Corel when we couldn't turn a profit on them.
It's normal during buyouts for the buying company's stock to drop and the stock of the company being bought to rise --- CORL dropping right now is nothing to worry about.
It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
Delphi will not suffer stagnation. The delay in the Delphi patch was related to a delay in the release of C++Builder. More details than that i'm not willing/able to give you at this time --- ask me at the conference.:)
I'm not sure what to think of this. It kind of saddens me if Borland will lose their name and become Corel. I was really looking forward to Kylix (Delphi/Builder for Linux), and I wrote them a detailed e-mail with suggestions on how to make it successful (not sure if they care what _I_ have to say, though). I explained that it would be best if they released their compiler and command line tools free of charge and charge for the development environments (this way OSS projects would still be possible.. distribute the Delphi source and they can use bcc to compile it). I also explained how important it was for Linux devlopers to have choice (in desktop environments and GUI toolkits).
I was happy to hear that Borland would indeed be releasing their command line tools free of charge, but what about the GUI stuff? I hope Corel won't be using this to have Borland only make Kylix work for KDE/Qt rather than GNOME/gtk+ (or whatever combination). I don't, however, think that Corel would be stupid enough to make Kylix a Corel-distro required thing. Now I'm also worried that they'll do the winelib thing with Kylix for some reason.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I think this is very cool
by
DragonHawk
·
· Score: 2
I may be wrong, but I see Unix in general, and Linux specifically, as one huge development environment.
So do I, and many others. Indeed, that was one of the main goals for the OS back when Unix was being written in the early 1970s. However, there is no reason you cannot add more tools to that environment, such as Borland's offerings.
I don't know how much Borland can add to the C/C++ tools, and I doubt there's room for another scripting language. Is Delphi all they have?
Borland's development tools are very nice to work with. Their VCL (GUI framework) is the best I've ever used. Elegant and easy. You can use their visual form editor to drag-n-drop, but you can also write it in code -- or both. The IDE detects changes you make to the code it writes, and back-updates any data files it needs.
I would really like to see C++Builder on Linux. Delphi, too. I like Object Pascal for its clean design. It isn't a standard, nor is it portable, unfortunately, which limits its uses in "real world" code, but I find it fun to play with, if nothing else. And Borland has a number of other products as well, in the database, Java, and CORBA markets.
So, yes, I think this could work. Will it? I don't know. If I could predict the future, I wouldn't need to work on computers for a living.:-)
--
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What about MS's shares in Borland
by
Sir+Banana
·
· Score: 1
If i'm not mistaken didn't MS buy a whole load of borland stock recently? I'm sure they won't object though since with a company in charge that is pushing Linux, development of windows apps may slow which can only be good for MS. Of course if borland do get good cross-platform tools then it could be considered a big threat.
-- --
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a
dog, it's too dark to read."
You think Corel is just a Linux company? Well, I guess I can't blame you, because that's what they want people to think.
Just go to their website, I'm sure they list some other products you may have heard of. Like WordPerfect. And "Corel Draw". Etc. They've been around for a while--probably 10 years. -- Java banners: Bad for users because Java kills Netscape
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Re:Inprise traded at $4 for years, now at $14
by
Zoltar
·
· Score: 2
It's true that they were trading at $4 - $6 but they were very undervalued at that price. I feel that the current 12-15 price range is much more fair.
I owned some Inprise stock (actually bought it when it was Borland) for a number of years and it was quite a bumpy ride. The main problem for Inprise was total and comlete turmoil in management. CEO's and CFO's coming and going, name chage ( I prefered Borland ) etc... They are a company that is floundering in a major way IMHO. Even though I ended up with a 50% profit I'm very happy to put that behind me.
I really can't see how they can justify 2.4 billion for a company with a market cap of 782 mill. Just plain nuts if you ask me.
Re:Pascal/Delphi on Linux
by
Synopsis
·
· Score: 3
You can try Free Pascal. It 99% compatible with tp7. And it has already a lot of Delphi features like classes RTTI, exceptions, ansistrings and FCL (Free Component Library).
Free Pascal can be found at http://www.freepascal.org
Two projects developping a GUI can be found at: http://www.kcl.freepascal.org/ http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Re:Corel's Been Around a Long Time
by
Sharkeys-Day
·
· Score: 1
Corel was also making SCSI interface products before CorelDraw! came along.
Most of their products are direct competitors to Corel products. The font technology would be nice but it's easier to just license it or get a font server that supports Type-1.
- NewTek (Lightwave, an awesome 3D production tool)
Corel is aiming at the office/desktop market. 3D production is probably too specialized.
- Sybase/Oracle (industrial strength DBMS)
They are getting Interbase from Borland/Inprise. Not as industrial strength, but not as hard to manage for the end user. And I don't think Oracle will be bought by anyone.
- Lotus (123, Notes)
Too late. IBM already bought them. Domino is available for Linux now. Corel has already demoed Quattro Pro on Linux.
If you don't see what is attractive in the product line, then you don't know much about Borland. Apparently you didn't know they had a database product, nor that Delphi is the #1 requested software package on Linux Journal's software Wishlist.
I'm amused that CNet headlines the story as "Corel to buy programming toolmaker for $2.44 billion", as if we wouldn't know who Borland and/or Inprise was.
Or is it just the old farts who remember such things?
The new company will be called Corel, but I think that the name you were concerned about would be Corel-Inprise/Borland. (Mathematical result left as an exercise for the reader)
Borland, famous Linux company
by
SEWilco
·
· Score: 2
The Reuters story says "Inprise/Borland sells development tools for Linux." As if those companies only had a history of Linux products. How amusing.
I'm a Delphi programmer. I was just asked at my work my opinion about what this means for Delphi. Here's a fragment of an email with my take on it. There's some thoughts on Corel as well that might help you understand why this happened.
------------------------------------
Corel is a company that knows very well how to side-step Microsoft. They are non-competitive with Microsoft, as you say, because it would be stupid to do so directly, as Borland found out, twice, first with office tools and then with development tools. At any rate, that sidestepping paid out in the long run - not only did they survive "the big Windows Desktop and Devtool wars" without nearly as many bruises as Borland, they still have all the products they ever did, and they ended up (counting their own Linux distribution and now the Visibroker and Borland development tools) with a cradle-to-grave solution that involves absolutely no Microsoft products (or products from any other vendor for that matter).
In addition, it's hard to find any other company with such a large scope of products (from OS to Enterprise to Desktop) except for Sun Microsystems and possibly IBM on their Unix market. It's actually kind of amazing to see them actually pulling it off. I see a Michael Cowpland book on the horizon.:-)
Since Delphi and C++ Builder) for Linux are not products that are out yet, but are in development now (albeit in early stages from what I've been able to extract from Inprise Linux people I've talked to), it will be very interesting to see if they will open source them (as they have behaved with their wine move and other things) to increase the rate of development while freeing some of their Delphi people to bugfix them. It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
In my opinion, Delphi suffered more when Borland lost over half of their Delphi team to Microsoft's Visual Basic team in the infamous "limousine lunch invitations" by "The Dead Borlanders Society" of Seattle - which prompted a lawsuit that was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount - than they are suffering here.
In any case Delphi in particular has already been suffering somewhat (in my opinion) from their concentration on Java development and CORBA/Java integration. The entropy is much higher from Delphi 3 to 5 (mainly because Delphi 3 to 4 was huge) than from Delphi 1through 3, even though 1 was 16-bit and 2 was a complete rewrite.
I'm definitely not saying that it will be a good thing for the next iteration of the product, but in the future, you'll have to remember that Unix people in general tend to care more about infrastructure than wizards. That change of view will probably be very healthy for the product in general, especially considering that the last two versions of Delphi have been feeling in general less stable and the do-it-yourself-with-code functionality is starting to go missing in newer features - so it's not just "don't use the wizard, it doesn't work right", it's "don't use the feature at all"... Delphi would be well served by a year of bugfix-only development in the manner of Sun's JDK1.3.
So all in all, I think it's actually "neutral" news from our perspective, at least until we see what the plans are (not that Delphi was a high priority in Borland anymore anyway). Now it would be good news if they GPLd Visibroker, which strategically is a smart thing to do (depending on how much revenue they're getting from it after factoring in all the Corel product revenue). Now = that = would save us some money.
Just my opinion from the Delphi front,
---------------- My opinions are mine of course, they don't represent the opinions of my employer, my cats, or slashdot:-)
>>It might also interest you to know that the >>Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a >>completely different team than the Delphi on >>Windows team (they hired all-linux developers >>to write the Delphi-Linux >>"Kylix" project).
>Really? I hadn't noticed that.
>--Robert West >--Delphi R&D
I'm sorry, seems like I have been misinformed at the last Borland Conference (where they gave all impression that the Linux team was a separate entity of "Real Linux guys" (whatever that meant) and they were doing the port). I apologize for that.
However, this begs the question. Will Delphi suffer stagnation during the next year due to the Linux port? Do you have more or less people/budget than you used to? Is the delay on the Delphi patch (which should address several important Corba/Midas issues for your enterprise customers) in any way related to this? As I wrote before, I'm not worried about the long term future of Delphi, but we still have deadlines and planning to do.
As a Linux user and enthusiast, I really like the fact that you are doing a port and all, but I don't want you guys to cover the front door and let the thief go in through the kitchen, if you know what I mean. Even if you are suffering from a shortage of resources to be able to release patches and such, as your clients, we kind of deserve to know, don't you agree?
-- - No Sig Today
Re:It's called being sent down to the minor league
by
Wah
·
· Score: 1
When your company can't survive the competitive Windows market..
Is this really going to work?
by
timster
·
· Score: 1
I may be wrong, but I see Unix in general, and Linux specifically, as one huge development environment. This merger might make sense if essential stuff like a C compiler were missing, but it isn't. And the Unix development environment is basically what most Unix developers want to use, isn't it? I don't know how much Borland can add to the C/C++ tools, and I doubt there's room for another scripting language. Is Delphi all they have? I think something like Delphi would be nice to see, though I can't see myself using it much. And it's hard to justify buying an entire corporation by the potential of one tool even if it's a very useful one. So does anyone have any clue what the real purpose behind this is?
-- I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
timster
·
· Score: 1
I didn't say it was. I'm quite aware that it isn't.
-- I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Tihstae
·
· Score: 1
I may be wrong, but I see Unix in general, and Linux specifically, as one huge development environment. This merger might make sense if essential stuff like a C compiler were missing, but it isn't. And the Unix development environment is basically what most Unix developers want to use, isn't it?
Did you forget how slow the C compilers are for *nix? It would be nice to have an IDE that would precompile while you were sitting there staring at the screen. The compile times are real slow with gcc compared to Borlands compiler.
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
CyberPup
·
· Score: 1
[..] I doubt there's room for another scripting language. Is Delphi all they have?
Another scripting language? You talking about Delphi? Delphi is not a scripting language. Spend some time with it before you make such a statement.
-- CP
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
GPierce
·
· Score: 1
There are no guarantees, but this could be one of the most brilliant strategic moves in a lot of years.
Borland has been light years ahead of Microsoft for over five years -- but they have never been able to sell their own product. There are a lot of reasons why this has been so.
Part of it is history. The Lotus "look and feel" lawsuit crippled the company at a critical time and eventually allowed the bean-counters to take over.
Part of it is the use of Pascal as a primary language. C++ programmers prefer C++ even if it takes five times as long to get anything done.
For a long time I preferred C++ and fought against Pascal as a really dumb language. Eventually cost-effectiveness convinced me that faster is better. The client is paying for results. (Borland does have a version of Delphi in C++ called C++ builder.)
Borland has an "open source" community that in many ways is a lot more effective than the linux community. No licenses, no copyleft, just good code that does realworld useful things. Some of it is sold and a very large amount is given away for free. Source code is always available.
Currently, there are three competing groups developing freeware Internet tool kits -- and distributing not only the tools but functional freeware applications built with them.
Whether it will work depends on whether Corel makes the investment to make a real linux port.
It they do, it gives developers the ability to write applications that run on linux, Windows and even AS400 of all god-awful platforms.
The catch here is that Delphi is highly dependent on the Windows API. It is going to be very interesting to see what Corel does in order to make the port. They may have to invent their own desktop.
Old Chinese Curse: "May you live in interesting times"
--
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
khiron
·
· Score: 1
>This merger might make sense if essential stuff like a C compiler were missing, but it isn't. And it's hard to justify buying an entire corporation by the potential of one tool even if it's a very useful one. Interbase - RDBMS VisiBroker - ORB MIDAS - Middleware JBuilder - Java AppServer - err AppServer One property acquired, is Borlands Patent Suite. Corel now owns the patents for 2-way-tools and a bunch of Windows widgets such as Fly-over hints and Tabbed dialogs.
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Stefan+MacGeek
·
· Score: 1
I would LOVE to see Delphi for Linux. Currently I mostly use Delphi on Windows. I have done some small projects on Linux with the standard Unix tools, and frankly, I find them clumsy, antiquated and difficult to use. I think they can be quite efficient, but they have a very steep learning curve at least. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but I also don't think that there is currently a development environment for Linux that has so many easy to use and well integrated components for UI development, database connectivity and about anything else a developer for business applications needs.
Re:Is this really going to work?
by
Radical+Rad
·
· Score: 1
Well it will prevent a Baby Bill division responsible for development tools from buying Inprise and getting a leg up into the Linux market.
I guess since Corel's going to buy Borland/Inprise, and since Microsoft has vested interest in Borland/Inprise, you could actually say that Microsoft is vested in a piece of Corel.:)
-- LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
MatriXOracle
·
· Score: 1
WordPerfect's Windows market share is around 15% in the US retail channel and has been slowly rising.. I'd hardly call this getting "hammered." Sure, MS has a far dominant share, but Corel is holding its own, and is even making some inroads. Obviously, though, they are never going to break out on Windows to the point that they're beating MS, and that's where Linux comes in.
If you recall, Quark tried to take over Adobe a year and a half ago. Adobe is valued at something like one and a half billion dollars, and Quark (itself half the size of Adobe) was too small to take them over. What makes you think (relatively puny) Corel would succeed?
--
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
$1.5 billion for Adobe? Doesn't the article (up top) say $2.44 billion?
I would absolutely LOVE it if I could run Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects and PageMaker on Linux, but then there'd be purists saying 'Gimp is better than PS' 'We have our own desktop video software' etc.
Internet access software and services firm??
by
ddpg
·
· Score: 1
Since when are they a Internet access software and services firm?? Am I missing something here? I picture them as a development tool provider. I don't think I've ever purchased internet access software from them or even services (except for tech support, but that doesn't count).
Re:Internet access software and services firm??
by
KenSeymour
·
· Score: 1
Try Visibroker.
I work at a Delphi/Visual C++ shop. We noticed recently a big shift away from development tools and toward CORBA ORBs and application servers. Too bad we are using neither.
-- "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
I think they are going to be keeping the same name, according to the article on yahoo"The new combined company, to be called Corel, "
``This gives us a real end-to-end solution from tools all the way to the suite on Linux and gives us clearly the largest set of Linux technology from any company,''
So has anyone really used the corel dist in a dedicated server environment? (And if so why no just use Debian..) e.g. the "end-to-end" statement, from all that i've seen corel linux is more focused on business desktop users. This merger will certainly help them there, bring them more applications with which to _sell_ and/or package with their distribution.
"Corel announced today that Peter Norton, original author of Norton Utilities, has been terminated with an undisclosed severance package" The newly acquired Norton/Symantec/Inprise products will be renamed as follows: Copeland Commander Copeland Guide Copeland Ghost 5.2 Copeland Utilities The new package artwork revealed shows Michael Copeland in a white dress shirt with arms crossed and at his side, his wife Marlen sporting a risqué dress made up of recycled XT motherboards. ---
CORL stock dropped on the news. I'm not sure why. They seem to be all the right stuff right now for the big desktop Linux distribution. I could see them becoming the largest supplier of Linux to corporate desktops in the US, and perhaps even take a good fraction out of MS in the next couple of years.
Wasn't Redhat planning to buy Corel? Along with VA/Andover and Pokemon of course....:)
-- XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Re:Any commitment to windows?
by
NavySpy
·
· Score: 1
David Intersimone and John Kaster of Borland Developer Relations have repeatedly and strongly stressed that Windows development will continue and that it is key to their business plan. They say Linux is "additive". Windows products are the bulk of their revenues. Why would they give that up?
At least the Inprise name will go away
by
NavySpy
·
· Score: 1
Once upon a time Corel announced support for OS/2. About a day later, they dropped it. I personally do not trust Cowpland, however I truly hope that this works out.
MSFT has preferred shares in Borland/Inprise as a result of having to settle out of court for something like $100 million - they had raided Borland/Inprise for their engineers and got sued for it. This is preferred stock, so it's non-voting.
But, yes, they will make out like Bandits in the buyout. Never underestimate the ability of MSFT to make money.
-- Will in Seattle
Why stocks (CORL) drop when they buy out others
by
WillAffleck
·
· Score: 2
This happens all the time. Usually, a good time to pick up a stock you've been wanting is a few days after an announced takeover attempt by it. The time to sell a takeover target is usually after it's been announced as a takeover.
[note - I own INPR shares]
Basically, the market is reacting to the difficulty and expense in merging a different organization into the buyer, while realizing that the buyee may be worth more than they thought.
An example would be the continual wars between American Home Products (AHP), Pfizer (PFE), Abbot Labs (ABT), and such. My shares in Pfizer and Abbot Labs keep bouncing up and down as everyone gets into this continual takeover spin.
Some companies, such as Cisco Systems (CSCO) specialize in rapid turnarounds of other companies. My shares in this don't seem to fluctuate in response to news of a takeover by Cisco as a result, since the shareholders "know" that Cisco can absorb the other company at little cost and at maximum profit.
-- Will in Seattle
Corel wants to be the MS of Linux Software
by
crt
·
· Score: 1
They've got it all now -- an Operating System, an Office Suite, and Development Tools. Obviously their pitch to system vendors is "bundle our whole package, it works best together!"
Not a bad plan... I just hope they keep Win32 Delphi around..
Considering that Inprise/Borland is luck to still be in business (and always seems to be on the verge of another crisis), it doesn't seem that strange.
Remember, Phillipe Kahn (sp?) almost drove Borland into the ground trying to be another Microsoft (buying WordPerfect and Ashton-Tate) instead of concentrating on Borland's key strengths. (Novell is another company that tried the same strategy and hasn't been as strong since).
Corel bought WordPerfect from Borland for a song; they're just picking up the rest of the company now.
I thought that Microsoft would have bought them (esp since they already owned part), but the anti-trust issues probably prevented that.
No, it was Novell that bought WordPerfect, not Borland.
Oops, you're right. Borland had their own word processor that never really gained any market share.
But Borland did waste too much time and money trying to compete against Microsoft in too many areas (Dev tools, business apps, databases). If they would have stuck to those they were the strongest in, Borland would probably be a strong (independent) company today.
I wonder if this means a big push for Borland Pascal/Delphi on Linux. Can someone who is familiar with Pascal say how GNU Pascal compares with Borland Pascal ATM?
Remember that Visual Basic was the big thing that got Windows a critical mass of apps (and some would say that "critical" describes many VB apps perfectly). Pascal on Linux *could* become popular, depending on Borland/Corel's marketing strategy.
--
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Re:Pascal/Delphi on Linux
by
andorxor
·
· Score: 1
Re:Pascal/Delphi on Linux
by
tconnors
·
· Score: 1
Well, a lot of people (myself included) say that the TP7 IDE is a kickass tool. Never used GNU pascal, but I'm guessing the debugger in TP7 (and delphi - delphi 3's "features" are quite nifty) is better than gdb, or whatever gets used with GNU pascal. User friendly can be a good word at times, something *nix is yet to discover. A nice IDE would be a welcome feature, if this merger happens.
Re:Pascal/Delphi on Linux
by
eric.t.f.bat
·
· Score: 1
The language really isn't the issue. Delphi actually uses the same compiler "engine" as Borland C++, so legend has it. Basically, just change expect("{"); to expect("begin"); and you're most of the way there...
The first big difference is the GUI. With Delphi, development is almost as easy as with VB, but the end product is much smoother and more tweakable; it's a compiler, not an interpreter.
The second big difference is what they call the VCL: the Visual Control Library. This is basically a Pascal interface to all the stuff that C programmers used to have to write message loops to handle. There are one or two special features in Borland's extensions to Pascal and C++ that handle this - message dispatching objects, object properties with implicit read/write operations, persistence, and so on.
Borland/Inprise/AshtonTate/Corel/WordPerfect/Kenne dy/Onassis Corporation has two tasks ahead of it, on the road to Delphi for Linux: converting the GUI, which is easy (KDEvelop is a good first try at the general idea), and creating a compatible but full-featured VCL. The second task is a doozy; ask one of the teams working on Delphi-compatible systems (for no good reason there seem to be two competing teams, a fact which might explain why they haven't finished anything yet, or might explain why they've tried so hard).
The advantage no one has realised yet: they'll be able to release C++ Builder they same day they release Delphi. They may even make the back-end pluggable, so you can use GCC, tho the GPL may make that difficult for commercial users since the VCL certainly won't be GPLed.
: Fruitbat :
-- I have discovered a truly remarkable.sig block which this margin is too small to conta
Umm, nope, it's the other way around. C++ Builder uses Delphi's compiler but only in the capacity of compiling pascal code for inclusion into projects and the VCL. The source code to the VCL ships with Delphi Pro and better editions, btw.
Delphi was one of the only reasons I really didn't want to leave the Windows world and spend all of my time working in UNIX.
Object Pascal is a great language, I'd place it in league with Java as far as code prettyness and functionality, and Delphi is an incredible IDE, far better than the GPL/Pascal compilers that I've played with, including FPC386.
If they get it running on Linux, I'm all over it like a filthy whore! ---
Corel's office suite is one of the three most popular office suites available (Lotus' is another one), though it is slowly getting hammered by MSOffice in the Windows market. As far as I know, all that Borland has which sells at all is some development tools, which are slowly getting hammered by MS in the Windows market.
Both companies have been unable to compete with MS on Windows. Both could potentially do well out of the Linux market. The new combined company must surely be relying on the Linux market for salvation.
--
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Re:Corel has an office suite
by
jbuilder
·
· Score: 2
First let's set down a few facts:
- Corel Office WAS Borland Office and then it was Novel Office. - It's easy to be one of the three most popular office suites when there are only three on the WinTel platform. - Inprise/Borland has been having tough times ever since the purchase of Ashton Tate. THAT was their downfall. They paid far too much for a company that they could have bought for a song. They also kept *way* too many of the Former A-T Employees. Probably about 80 percent of the holdovers could have been dismissed - especially considering the fact that the only A-T products that were kept were Interbase and dBASE and most of the employees that were retained were support and marketing groups for the products that Borland dismissed.
- While true, both companies have been tromped on by MS (remember Novel bought the Borland Office who sold it to Corel - so the spanking goes back even further), Inprise has been working *extremely* hard to re-invent itself into a non-Windows company (JBuilder and the AppServer were just the first steps). And I *think* that Corel was taking a cue from their lead.
- And Borland tools *still* do *extremely* well in the Wintel market.
- BInprise and Corel have *both* been doing well in the Linux market (the problem is that most of the stuff so far has been free - JBuilder Foundation, for example). Now if they can just make this move as *profitable* as it has been *popular* we'll have a serious tools company.
These things being said.. I think this is great for Borland/Inprise/Whatever... I worry about what this will do for Corel...
Companies like this are barely surviving. The media goes crazy when they here these "big mergers" that will challenge Microsoft. Ha! I say.
Being an ex-Amiga user I understand the passions behind Linux and the anti-Microsoft movement, but you have to analyze your opponent wisely.
Ever use Borland's JBuilder? What an utter piece of garbate. Let's face it, Microsoft is far from perfect, but they do make some good software (not all of it, but some of it).
This all-or-nothing approach will be the death of any company that stands to compete with MS. As Ballmer once said, "You gotta ride the bear."
I have used JBuilder, though I use AnyJ now, and I think it is a terrific piece of software. I was extremely productive on it, and it was a nice change from Cafe's shortcomings.
Sorry to be pedantic but if you actually read the Yahoo article it specifically says, "The new combined company, to be called Corel...." and anyway wouldn't that be Corel-Inprise-Borland?
Borland has been around a long time and has a very large and successful product line. How long has Corel been around, and what does it have besides a relatively recent Linux distro? It would seem to me to make more sense the other way around, Borland buying Corel. Not saying it's good or bad...just weird.
I expect tomorrow Winzip (Niko Mak) will buy Microsoft in order to leverage their product.
Well, it looks like a good thing on the surface. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how this deal turns out.
One thing I can see is that the both of them gain a list of customer contacts and get to share the intellectual resources of the staff working on the various programming projects. This could be a very good thing as it could allow projects to be finished sooner (potentially) and have a larger customer base to market products to.
I suppose, however, that the thing could also go sour fast if things aren't handled right.
--
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
Inprise traded at $4 for years, now at $14
by
Cy+Guy
·
· Score: 2
COREL is buying Inprise for less than its recent high prices, but the prices still includes a significant recent added "Linux premium"
Prior to October, Inprise had been trading in the $4 - $6 range for over a year.
As a result, some investors may feel Inprise got the better end of the deal.
Database backend and ASP Server key to deal
by
Cy+Guy
·
· Score: 3
what products does Corel offer? . . . a Word processor/Business suite [and a] OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system.
Everyone in the press and here keep talking about the developer tools as the big addition to Corel's inventory, but I think it really the ASP Server software and InterBase database backend that are the real future. The developer tools combined with COREL's WINE enhancement will be a big benefit to the Linux community, but from a business standpoint, the one-two punch of client OS/Office Suite + Server OS/database backend is the real money maker. Add-in the benefits of Corel's relationship with ASP client developer GOJO, and Inprise Application Server, and you're talking a great business model.
Either the Office Suite division (WordPerfect, QuattroPro, etc.) or the Graphics division (Draw, PhotoPaint, etc.). With today's purchase of Inprise/Borland, Corel has made it's bed in the Linux camp and their resources are spread too thin to cover all of these bases. Adobe Systems would be a great purchase of the graphics division.
Has anyone seen any kind of statement from Inprise/Borland that they are going to continue producing Windows development tools? I'd love to go 100% linux today, but I'm not going to be able to get all my customers to leave windows anytime soon. And until they do, I'll be using Delphi to build windows apps. I wonder what this is going to Delphi/C++ Builder support of Microsoft "standards". The recent addition of ADO support to Delphi has really helped performance of MS SQL database apps. And the ISAPI support is really good too.
We will benefit because of better development tools.
I've been drooling of the prospect of having Delphi on Linux (aka Kylix (which also is a C++ environment). Our shop uses Delphi exclusively (on Windows (yuk)). I gave up C++ when Delphi became available (say what you want) simply because it gave the ease of development of VB with almost as much power as C++. Our products work and ship ahead of schedule. We owe that to Delphi being as well designed and capable as it is.
Linux development really demands knowing the internals of Linux AND the graphical libraries that are out there (not that this is bad, mind you). Being able to hide this complexity from the developer while providing the rich and full feature set of Delphi will only enhance the Linux development experience.
The only downsides I can see from this move is that Borland essentially redefined Pascal for the Windows environment. As such, it set a standard for Pascal which is not the same as the one everyone else is familiar with. This will mean that Open Sourced code will not be compilable by other pascal compilers.
The other is that there will be an infusion of garbage programs written by programmer wannabees.
However, the end result, I believe, will be more high quality and appropriately priced (or free) applications for Linux and, potentially, other *nix's. That can only be a good thing for power users and business/causual users alike.
Corel Drrrrrrrraw buys Bugland? And aim $2B on Linux? Anyone care to share transition plan from Linux to *BSD? Really, I've been using Bugland's tools for years on a daily basis, up to D4, and I can tell you that it's a damn bloated buggy memory hog. And yes, WP 8, `productivity tool'.... Hehe, join any Linux newbie group and hear people WOEING about damn thing. They have enough pain with it, and dump it, and get back to Windoze. But distro maker doesn't care- they already got their money. Video kills the radio star.
I wanna know why the heck this is rated flamebait?! I'm using Linux now, and I like it, but the hype raised by corporations around it is really killing a Good Thing! You should spend some of your time talking to newbies and hear how _they_ rate support they receive from RH or Corel! Sheesh, I'd hate to see Linux buried under corporate bloatware. There's nothing imagined in my post, I'm talking about the things I _know_, this is the reality, get it. It can't be good, or bad, it's just there, no matter how you rate it!
--
KuroiNeko
Re:Could be interesting.
by
kuroineko
·
· Score: 1
In no way. Inprise degraded from the one and only vendor of development tools to corba-schmorba supplier. Corel used to make not excellent, but sometimes useable, graphics package. They both lost the battle in their fields and now trying to re-gain strategic heights with the help of Linux. Their $2B is merely an air, they have no skilled personnel or great know-how behind them. Loosers. Forever. They can shake the boat and get JR Luser on their side. For day or two. And this hype makes me sick. I want my *BSD. Now.
--
KuroiNeko
Re:CNBC interviews Inprise/Corel CEOs Linux Public
by
kuroineko
·
· Score: 1
Get real, man. This is a share-healing hype for Corel and Inprise, not advertisement of Linux. I doubt there's a suit who never heared about Linux, it's been even in FinnAir in-flight zine. So what? Do _you_ feel any better now?
--
KuroiNeko
Re:Sad, Sad day for Delphi Developers
by
kuroineko
·
· Score: 1
At least TP/TC are public domain now. FPK is doing very well, you can still use Pascal. But hey, this is just syntax. My first language was Pascal, and there was a time I really hated to wirte a line in C. These days I just don't care. C? Pascal? Perl? Here you are. Zillions of lines of hi quality code, docs, examples and help. Welcome to proframmers' paradise:)
--
KuroiNeko
Re:Sad, Sad day for Delphi Developers
by
kuroineko
·
· Score: 1
At least TP/TC are public domain now. FPK is doing very well, you can still use Pascal. But hey, this is just syntax. My first language was Pascal, and there was a time I really hated to wirte a line in C. These days I just don't care. C? Pascal? Perl? Here you are. Zillions of lines of hi quality code, docs, examples and help. Welcome to programmers' paradise:)
--
KuroiNeko
If you don't like it....
by
kuroineko
·
· Score: 1
....keep in mind that _you_ can change the things. Give your preference to alternative solutions, explain others, what is your choice, and why, be carefull about the way your money goes. Vendors are there to satisfy customers' needs, not buyers are to fill corporate pockets. Vote with your money. Don't buy into Sunday column hype, make your research and make _your_ choice. No one can serve two masters. If board thinks too much about share surge, they don't care about product quality anymore. We all have seen this. Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra?!
--
KuroiNeko
Sad, Sad day for Delphi Developers
by
ka9dgx
·
· Score: 1
Well, the end is now here, we will soon be reduced to the medeocrity of Micro$oft tools, and bad languages like 'C++'. YUCK!!!
I'm going to have to kiss Delphi goodbye, and it won't be easy.
Goodbye Turbo Pascal, goodbye Dephi. I will miss you.::: sniff:::
What will they open source?
by
dsplat
·
· Score: 3
Other companies (Redhat, VA Linux) have shown that they understand how to maintain the goodwill of the open source community. Eric Raymond's article The Magic Cauldron spells out several ways to make money in open source. I'd like to know more about Corel's plans, but I think we'll just have to wait and watch. They have certainly done the right things on Wine, so I'm hopefully that we will see more good things from them in the future.
-- The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
With such a large stake in Linux and products for the platform, they may wanna gain more control over it.
Have you ever read the an_a_l-retentive copyright notices in Corel and Borland's releases? It made me throw up and junk the crap.
They've played the proprietary, hooks in the flesh of the installed base, game even harder than Microsoft. That's undoubtedly one of the foremost reasons why they lost; because fewer people let themselves get trapped.
They are losers, and like all losers they haven't learned at all. I'm sure they are thinking out ways to go back to what they did before, using Linux to get there.
Bill Gates Buys Canada
by
billstewart
·
· Score: 1
Bill Gates, reacting to the threat of a Beowulf cluster of Canadian companies and wanting to use Vancouver as an extension to the Seattle housing market, announced that Microsoft is buying Canada.
"It's also a convenient way out of our US anti-trust problems - rather than being subject to the Justice Department, we're now dealing with the State Department and the Pentagon, who are much more flexible. It's possible we'll still have to divest Quebec, but c'est la guerre."
--
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sounds like a boon for Linux IDE's
by
nlh
·
· Score: 1
I'm fairly excited to hear this news, because I imagine this means that Corel will make sure that Inprise's JBuilder Enterprise Edition makes it to the Linux platform.
I'm in the midst of a fairly heavy Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based development project and have been for the most part displeased with Sun's Forte for Java, one of the only commercial-level Java IDE's available for Linux (that I know of). They have decent module support for the J2EE features (Servlets, EJBs, JDBC, RMI, etc.) but the IDE is sloooooow.
Inprise has recently made JBuilder Foundation (i.e. Lite) available for Linux, but that lacks the support for the J2EE stuff and doesn't quite fit the bill. JBuilder EE, however, is currently only available for Windoze and Solaris.
On that note, maybe I'm getting unnecessarily excited. Are there any J2EE-capable development environments currently available for Linux that can handle multi-party development and all that good stuff? Might I just be best off with Emacs + CVS? Maybe an "Ask Slashdot" is in order for this one....
don't forget the MS bag of Dirty Tricks(tm)
by
SEAL
·
· Score: 1
I wish I could provide a link on this - I will scrounge for one. I used to work on the VS team, though.
As I recall, MS played hardball with Borland awhile back. Essentially, MS scooped up some of Borland's key backend compiler gurus by offering them enormous amounts of $$. This really had a detrimental effect on Borland's success and at the same time, improved the Microsoft compiler line.
On the good side, we should see some more professional visual development tools for linux. On that bad side, they will probably change the name again. Coral-Inprise-Borland sounds more like a law office than a software division.
This is good for the Linux Community
by
dudle
·
· Score: 1
This is not a Troll, but...
Borland always produced better programming tools than Microsoft. You can take it anyway you want, but a Delphi outperforms any VB and VC++... any day!
Again, this is not a Troll but...
Corel always tried to play in the office application kindergarden. They bought Wordperfect and had a hard time with it.
The thing is that Corel and Borland had their best programmers "stollen" by Microsoft. More money offered. Now that they are together, they might have a better chance.
We shall see...
-- Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
There's a webcast of the announcement (if you can bear the tedium!) at www.borland.com at 16.30 GMT. Probably (IMPO) the usual 'we're really jazzed we could get together.' stuff as opposed to analysis, but there you go.
________________ 'There are no black cats, only black cat - shaped holes in the universe.' -Arundhati Roy
Corel has shown that they will support Linux and that they have intentions of making money from it. This is good for Corel and it's good for Linux.
Linux will benefit from having another "Powerhouse" distribution (in addition to Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware) to compete with the strong companies in the Microsoft world.
Corel will benefit because it is becoming a major player in the Linux game. Attaboy Corel. Keep bring Linux to the desktop.
-- That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Corel's Been Around a Long Time
by
John+Murdoch
·
· Score: 3
Corel was originally a custom software provider, focusing on the Canadian federal government, in the mid-1980s. In the late 80s Corel developed a graphics package named Corel Draw! (they used to add an exclamation point to all their products) as a companion tool for Xerox Ventura Publisher. The original version of Corel Draw! shipped with a Microsoft Windows 2.15 runtime--Corel Draw! 1.0 was how I first bought Windows.
In 1991 Corel bought the Ventura Software division from Xerox. Corel attempted to package several graphics package bundles, but their development efforts were hampered by both sales and programming obstacles. (The big programming obstacle was that Ventura Publisher was an assembly-language hack--no documentation, and the original programmer was long gone.)
Mike Cowpland (rhymes with "hope-land") of Corel has worked very hard at being a wheeler-dealer. He has bought a couple of well-regarded names for lots of Corel stock and very little cash--he bought WordPerfect (but not WordPerfect's payroll) from Novell for a lot of stock but only about $10 million in cash in the mid-90s. In this transaction he's "buying" Borland with newly-issued stock and no cash. (This transaction dilutes the shareholders interests by 44%--but doesn't cost Corel a dime.)
(FWIW: I used to be a tech support forum sysop on Ventura Software's CompuServe forum. I used to do technical illustration of children's books using Corel Draw.)
The lifestyle of the boss can suck energy from a creative organization. I've heard that Cowpland likes status symbols. It signals about a big ego and needs for hierarchy. A creative organization works best when the hierarchy is low. Cowpland is a burden to Corel.
I'm not terribly surprised about the purchase. Remember the WordPerfect/Borland joint venture which resulted in "Borland Office." Novell bought it and sold it to Corel. There are a lot of historical ties here.
Of course, there are also ideological ties -- the universal "us vs. Microsoft" one. Each of these joint venture players had their market shares eaten away by Microsoft. Ideology follows the people.
Linux represents a huge opportunity for anyone with the flexibility to move fast enough. Microsoft has already shown that they respond too slowly to innovation. The fact that this purchase is happening now says something about what they expect the Linux market to do in the near future and that there is money to be made while Microsoft "wakes up." (Remember Microsoft's initial response to the Internet...)
Your memory must be fading in your old age, Corporal. In the first war, you were on the Western front, and in the second, you never made it to any front. I guess nostalgia isn't what it was in your day, eh?
Good advice, though, especially about winter. I'll be looking forward to more of it.
Small step for code, giant step for domaination
by
71thumper
·
· Score: 1
I'm hopeful that Corel (which has good name recognition amongst the non-techie) with the company-formerly-known-as-Borland can provide the first true, end-to-end competition with the Windows giant.
If they drive great development tools (especially Delphi) into th market, with th ability to market with a distribution, well, I think that's a winning combination.
Another superpower? could we be seeing the rise of Linux based communities to positions of power? They own Word Perfect, and now they own Borland. They have a C++ prog, which could have implications on programs like cc and gcc. What other programs does Boreland make, as I forget?
-- Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
I watched a bobsleigh competition on TV yesterday, and Corel was one of the sponsors. On almost every sleigh, there was a big "Corel Linux" logo, right at the front. I think that was pretty fun, I've never seen any Linux ads on TV before anyway.
Both a Linux AND a Windoze play?
by
re-geeked
·
· Score: 2
Besides the obvious intent to offer all things desktop in Linux land, this acquisition has an extra level of intrigue in that Inprise is one of the very few companies besides Corel with significant revenues selling Windows corporate desktop software.
Is Corel also hoping to take a bigger piece of the post-DoJ Windows software market?
-- "You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
So this is what they meant...
by
Dr.+Nonsense
·
· Score: 1
So this is what they meant when one of the guys at the booth said to me... "We keep changing our name."
I guess it should have happened
by
aav
·
· Score: 1
Ever since I heard that Borland intended to port Delphi and Builder under Linux I wondered if they had the financial power to resist to a tremendous pressure that's been lying above their heads lately. And, of course, by this I mean Microsoft. Furthermore, their only chance to succeed in the Linux World is to release the products for free (or almost) and if possible open sourced. Because otherwise there are other IDE's that are more interesting. Take for example Kdevelop - it doesn't provide the same features as Builder, it is less powerful, but it is released under GPL, it started really well and it's only a matter of time to achieve the functionality of Builder. In this situations, who'd want a similar, more expensive product ? Corel, has the means to make Delphi and Builder a part of their distribution, and this would be a big advantage for them. I, for one, I would think of buying it only because of Builder. I know, the development tools don't make a distribution, but for me they are very important. And Builder is great. As you can see one can wonder of what will happen in the (near) future. Will Corel speed-up the porting of Delphi and Builder ? Will they continue to release Windows versions of the above mentioned IDE's ? How are they going to deal with the portability ? Because even if I find the VCL very well designed (and complete too), I don't think it is actually very portable. Will Qt be an option ? I certainly hope these questions will have an aswer really soon 'cause I'm very curious.
Valuation of Corel/Inprise Deal
by
daBuddha
·
· Score: 1
Many folks have posted their surprise at Inprise-Borland being valued at $2.44B...in fact, if you read the press release closely (and check the companies individually), the value of the *combined* enterprise will be $2.44B
A rdbms no one uses. A java ide inferior to ibm's. I'm sure there is more but borland/inprise doesn't seem like the best deal around.
But then again isn't 2.4 bn $ kind of no money at all compared to other companies (like what is it Yahoo has that merits it's value).
As usual I don't get it.
Like if I had 2.4 bn $ I bet I could become a world player in something real like ballbearings or rubber. I wouldn't spend it on some dying IT company (or maybe I would , it feels like I don't know shit anymore). I bet everyone needs ballbearings and rubber but who need borland?
I think Corel and VA are on a collision course. Corel with closed source tools and VA with opensource tools (I've never heard anyone use the word opensource as much as Augustin). And lets not forget about Red Hat and Cygnus.
There is a lot of money involved here, and a lot of companies that are trying to trump Micro$oft. Whatever happens it'll be interesting, however, in the end I still think the business ethic will mean that things won't get a whole lot better.
Am I alone in thinking that companies like Netscape and Corel who release closed source apps for Linux and then trumpet themselves as Linux powerhouses just don't get it.
AbiWord, Gnumeric. KOffice...the future of productivity apps is free software and that's free as in free speech.
It looks like Michael Cowpland's fat ego is on a roll again. His lousy stock makes a slight move and he thinks he owns the world. I used to work at Corel. Everytime Cowpland opened his mouth or made a strategic move everyone froze in fear.
Slashdot Mirror
"designed to capitalize on the growing Linux market"
finally,someone who sees the true potential of LINUX.
--------A rimjob-----------
Are they gonna use those cute little Canadian dollars? You know, if you get like truckload of them, you can buy a cup of coffee in the states.
Damned freeloading Canadians.
More info can be found here.
send feedback to Ryan Meader.
That would be nice -- if they ported Turbo C/Pascal/ASM to linux/elf and put it under a free license, maybe x86 linux users would have a decent compiler besides lcc.
This announce is a good news for Qt. You should remember that Corel distribution is based on KDE, which is based on Qt. The next step will be the port of Delphi to Qt.
See you soon...
Normally, the buyers stock is supposed to drop because their stockholders are paying the premium to acquire the other company beyond what it is worth. In a few cases, when the companies mesh together well (or they are dot.com companies!) they can both go up.
What are you talking about? GCC is one of the finest compilers available ANYWHERE right now. Sure it doesn't have the greatest CPU specific optimizations, but it practically guarantees portability across supported platforms by being consistent and stable. It compiles code many other compilers barf on.
It's my hope that this merger will mean more apps for Linux. As you may know Borland is hard at work porting their VCL (Visual Component library) to Linux. They already have a program that can convert a program written in MFC to VCL for Windows, and when the Linux version is out Poof! a whole shload of Linux software just pops up. I would speculate that Corel uses Borland products so they are really interested in that type of platform independence. Just a speculation though
Yeah, I hope they move some of those jobs up here. The US sucks up all of our best coders, and then screws ME over every time I cross the border to do some consulting work in the states, simply because I am a Canadian citizen and, in their words, "I am taking work away from Americans". It'd be nice to see some payback by moving those Borland jobs up to Canada. Preferably BC.
2.44 billion USD is NOT a *change*
everything corel do, they mess up, ie., corel linux etc. is this goodbye delphi? in the long term, yes. but, being positive, hopefully, borland development tools will be ported to macs as well.. since corel support these fine machines as well...
No, it was Novell that bought WordPerfect, not Borland.
Sure thing, buddy. Win2K slays any operating system that Corel has ever even dreamt of releasing.
It compiles code many other compilers barf on.
Yes. Microsoft's J++ does that kind of "embrace and extend" too. Both GCC and J++ have subtle "extra features" that, when programmers use them, turn their code into something that can be built solely on that particular compiler. ***
It got discussed to death on Usenet this past year.
(*** when GCC is run with error checking to flag any non-ANSI compliant code, it doesn't flag everything. The GCC team are famous for thumbing their nose at the C Standards committee.)
The above post should be marked down as off-topic\ (so should this post)
Nah. Redhat owns Cygnus, the people who write GCC (for all intents and purposes, noone else really contributes anymore). With Cygnus, Redhat has the number ONE development platform available for Linux (and other systems). Corel is buying a Windows development company who have only in the last few months discovered Linux even exists. Frankly I don't think it'll work out.
When your company can't survive the competitive Windows market, it's time to pack your bags and start giving your software away to Linux users before it dies out completely.
Maybe Corel will re-engineer their Linux so that the kernel builds on non-GPL'd Borland C/C++. Then they can add code to it that breaks GCC and be on their merry proprietary way.
I know I'd LIKE a non-GCC to implement a completely non-GNU freenix. Maybe NetBSD could be ported over to a non-GNU Borland C.
I belive they ported Interbase.
their best programmers "stollen" by Microsoft
You mean Bill offered them some cake?
The amount of sheer illiteracy on Slashdot - and the internet in general really, never fails to amaze me...
Oh, and "stollen" is a kind of cake, for anyone who didn't get it.
Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic as hell that MS almost kills off both Corel and Borland, both companies jump on the Linux bandwagon, merge, and are now poised to be a very serious threat to MS in the business world? I guess that what goes around really does come around.
What, GCC isn't perfect? OMFG! Alert the press.
;)
Call God. Strike that. Call Linus.
Anyone want to compile this with GCC and
tell me what happens when i is >= 7?
I'll tell you what happens with a _real_
compiler...
main()
{
float x = 3.14;
long i;
for (i=0;i<1000000000;i++)
x=x*x;
}
"Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware"
BSD: Because rebooting every week for a new Kernel is for Linux.
Well, you are wrong on at least one assumption: I am professionnal developper, was trained in the GUI world of Mac and Windows, and I will not consider developping software for Linux until there's a GOOD IDE available for it. Like the one Borland provides. I still consider having to learn arcane editor commands and scripting tools to be counter-productive, maybe because nobody showed me the light, or maybe because after 25 years of computer evolution we are justified to ask for a choice of more modern programming environments, complementing the command-line ones. Then again, it's not the tools, it's what you make with them...
Also, Borland has an excellent libary of RAD components, that ships along their Delphi, C++ and Java tools, and that in itself might be their greatest asset. Can anybody say _easy_ (if not _lazy_) database, internet, GUI apps? And I know from personnal experience that the Delphi community is a very fertile land for public component building and sharing. Now if you could get that community to cross the river, and to start working on an open-source OS like Linux, I bet that very interesting things could happen...
If Linux is poised to make it big, you're going to need tons of application developpers writing programs for it. And most of those guys (and gals) are for now working within Windows. I'm just thinking about all those junior VB-only programmers out there - from VB to gcc, now that's a _steep_ curve. I guess there is a great market oppportunity here: User friendly, powerful development tool required to ease the pain X many GUI developpers required to write apps = lots of money.
Nasal Cornfield
"Oh. Yeah."
This is very good news for Linux, all things considered, and I bet Redmond is none too happy with the news.
ummm... Lotus is still part of IBM as I remember and making $$$ with notes Sybase even with the beating they have taken is still too big to swallow Adobe would cause anti-trust problems not to mention not being able to afford it...
Maybe corel realized that its distro needs an open source quattropro and db (paradox ?), and borland realized that corel would drop these two desktop cash cows if it did not play ball and stay in the corel suite, i.e. respond to market.
I just hope the new organization can foresee a change from the current policy of corel of mere credibility by open source to the wealth generating concept of the gpl.
Actaully, the presence of additional C compilers on Linux and the other Freenixes might force the GCC people to start actually following standards, rather than engaging in their embrace-and-extend adventures.
But we'll have to see.
I cast thy soul to hell, GUI loving demon! Intuitive GUI's are for stupid, stupid, windows users!
Borland can add the first real development environment to linux. Hell, with Builder, development under linux will be just as good as anywhere else.
Believe it or not, there IS a world beyond editing make files and hand-crafting dialog boxes, and there are many big developers who greatly prefer it.
That is correct, though most if not all the topnotch programmers took the plane for Richmond a few years back. You can argue about it, but the Borland dev. products are not what they used to be, except maybe the JBuilder series, and look: Isn`t that latest version running on java - read: Linux ? How about that. On the other hand, everybody has the recent leave of top-employees at Netscape just before and after the AOL acquisition fresh in their mind. And I guess you are all running IE5, right ? Nuff said.. Ignace.
I think this is an interesting acquisition. One thing a lot of people have missed is that, when Kylix is out, Corel own a development tool that will allow them to build application for Linux and Windows at the same time. This using Kylix for Linux and Delphi/C++ Builder for Windows. The Windows environment makes a lot of money for them (especially the CorelDraw Suite I would imagine) and they are starting to move more towards the Linux market now. Makes sence to acquire a RAD development tool that will cover both. Of course, this is more of a long-term advantage. As for Inprise/Borland/Corelland(?), it maybe finally gives them the money to get those adds out. And, people, let's not forget that C++ Builder (which is the main reason I changed from Atari to WinTel) is made around a very C++ standard compliant compiler. And the signs are that this compiler (Borland C++ 5.5) will be free! Eric
Corel-Inprise-Borland. Not a law office, more like the owner of an ocean going fleet of merchant ships. Or an oil exploration company.
Remember, Phillipe Kahn (sp?) almost drove Borland into the ground trying to be another Microsoft
Well, actually it was some things in his personal life, which may or may not be occuring now. Just run through the newspaper articles of the period. He, uh, was focused on things other than the day to day business.
It was an amazing company in its day. I still use Sidekick 1.0, not the cruddy Windows version. Porting Sidekick DOS would be cool.
I wonder what ever happened to ParadoxDOS? That was SQL, just field oriented. It is great, and it just screams on today's hardware. It can crosstab a table of 150,000 records in under 2 seconds.
Wonder if PdoxDOS will be resurrected - not interested in PWin with the awful ObjectPal, also known as AbjectPal because it was an abject disaster.
There is nothing available for Linux as good as Delphi, although ISE Eiffel comes close. Delphi is highly respected by language experts in the know, such as Jean Ichbiah designer of Ada. Delphi allows rapid development yet enforces good software engineering practices. In terms of speed of development and robust software, C++ is far behind.
Besides, Corel is the one with the vision and leadership among the two, and with a far larger growth... Inprise has been in turmoil for years.
2. WordPerfect. Hmmmm. One thing Novell has touched and hasn't been completely ruined.
3. It's good to see new leadership at Inprise. They have been languishing for far too long. Anyone buy stock when it was at $2 and change?
4. Need I say more?
Are we going to see any other Linux distros get more into the industrial-strength CORBA space (sorry ORBit, not there yet; MICO almost), with vendors like OOC, etc.?
Actually, Corel has shown signs of increasing their share of the office products market on Windows lately, after they started marketing it more agressively, and lowered prices.
Altavista was sold to CMGI
I usually upgrade only when security problems are found (rarely), or the new kernel provide essential new features.
I guess you view "jumping on the Linux bandwagon" as a move of stregnth, while some of us view it as an act of desparation.
Excuse me? Corel was at about USD 2,- a year ago. Now they are at about USD 20,-... A slight move?
Uh... Borland already "lost" their name... They changed their name to Inprise a long time ago.
I just bought some shares for my portfolio. --darkharlequin
inprise has delphi and its own java development environment to and it has a couple database things like paradox and such so its not just delphi and a C compiler thought your right the borlan C wouldn't be of any use since linux/unix already has a working C compiler but maybe they could port the ide there ide has some nice stuff like a C to asm translater (not of much use but still kind of cool).
Being an ex Corel employee, I can tell you that the irony of this whole deal is that Corel doesn't even use Borlands C++ compiler (does anyone?), they use Microsoft Visual C++.
-the Canadian federal gov't has made considerable tax incentives available to companies who have a significant R&D presence (ala Nortel)
-there is a *huge* tax disparity between Canada and the US (ie, top tax bracket in Canada starts at approx. US$42,000, whereas in the US top tax bracket is US$285,000 - taken from John Roth interview somewhere)
-our Prime Minister insists that there is no "brain drain" (ie, smart people leaving Canada), if Canadian don't like the taxes, they can leave (yes, he actually said that)
-Currently, you have to pay capital gains tax on stock options if you excersize them even if you haven't sold them.
So, basically, I think Canada turns out a lot of smart people, but a lot of them leave the country because of the massive incentives available elsewhere. So, while I would love to live in California or Florida come January, I think there needs to be a wake up call to the Canadian fed. gov't. How about someone starting a "Save the Canadians" campaign :)
COWPLAND?
Is that a military acronym for Cow Pie Land?
Sounds like a lot of BS to me.
Next: Caldera buys Corel. There's a big family reunion. Caldera then offers an OpenLinux-Workstation ditribution with a bundled Corel Suite (or a Corel suite with a bundled distribution), and an OpenLinux-Server distribution--just like Microsoft. Development suite sold separately. Anti-MS activities coordinated through the former WordPerfect campus in Orem, UT.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ah, Corel. Who else would do garbage collection on the computer industry if they weren't around. Corel seems hell-bent on buying every once-great company that has been beaten into the ground by Microsoft. It's as if they aspire to remain a software underdog forever.
WordPerfect used to be a lovely word-processer, until Novell assimilated and sucked the blood from it. Microsoft Word began outselling it into the ground. Then Corel swooped in and bought it, and started selling it cheaply to college students.
Now Borland, a once-great compiler company, has fallen so far that even their name is no longer worth anything. May as well change it to Inprise or some other focus-group invented name. Their IDE is not as good as Microsoft's and not as many people use Delphi as use Visual Basic. Hey, why not have Corel swoop in and buy them out?
What's next? Compuserve?
I admire Corel for wanting to provide consumer apps and tools for Linux, and for promoting Linux with Yet Another Distribution, but does anyone else get the feeling that we are witnessing the birth of the world's largest Shovelware company?
Corel -- All your favorite has-beens under one corporate roof(tm)! (We also created Linux)
At about 12:30 pm CST today, CNBC TV had a live interview from New York with the CEOs of Corel and Inprise. Wow, lots and lots of terrific plugs for Linux. In fact it was *all* about Linux. "Linux is the future", "Linux is low cost", "we will be providing the migration tools from Windows to Linux", and on and on. Man, that is great advertising, especially since TV CNBC's prime audience is corporate suits and investors. A lot of them who hadn't thought about Linux before, will sure be thinking about it now. Great going Corel and Inprise!
Well, it has happened before. Consider Nortel's takeover of Bay Networks.
I would think they should be able to abstract out whether QT or GTK (or even straight Athena-based or Xt-based), for the most part. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it can be done via CORBA... I hope it does not mean that COM/DCOM, MFC, and other Microsoft "innovations" are coming soon to a Linux near you, nor that Delphi on Linux becomes tightly bound to WP...
shhhh, its okay little one.. Big bad Corel wont hurt you anymore.. Micro(soft)mommie is here to keep you safe
You f'ing pedant.
Borland sued Microsoft after MS raided the Delphi development team awhile back, around Delphi 3 days. We're talking serious flaunting of money, not leaving them alone, etc. Look how closer to Delphi VB is rather than the other way around.
It seems like Microsoft did step over the lines a little bit.
Most of focus has been on whether Corel as Linux Powerhouse will be good for Linux. Let's assume it is. What about the 10% stake of MS in Inprise. Inprise owns 44% Corel post merger, so it owns 4.4.% of new Corel post merger. Is this a Trojan Horse. Maybe this is their Linux strategy in the near term. Hedge their bets . If Linux becomes big, they have a peice of the action. If it gets really big, they buy Corel. I am less concerned about Corel becoming a major linux player than I am about MS coming along for the ride. Like some tropical pest hiding in a freight shipment of Bannanas. Penguins can fly
They also make an Internet appliance / Server box but I think they sell it thru a subsidiary Rebel.com
I doubt Corel will want to dominate a market already dominated by RedHat... However...RedHat can't even make a better user interface to install itself onto a given system without choking. They had to use Caldera's Lizard and they STILL botched it. Stupid RH6.1 didn't even see my Ensoniq PCI sound card. Nevertheless, Corel can't open source the compiler. It wouldn't be in their interest. I'd shell out money for a GUI IDE to start cloning Mickeysoft products to Linux to attract more users, hence, giving developer and incentive to make more programs for Linux, hence, making everyone more money. =] Everything doesn't HAVE to be FREE or OPEN to reap the rewards. That's just a copout for cheap tightwaded people or for the wannabe's that can't get real jobs. I honestly think saying, "Beware of Corel," is more or less paranoia based on the experiences with Microsoft. I'd be more afraid of RedHat not doing any further development to make Linux more user friendly so all of us can make cheap Greeting Card Makers for $10 a pop so mom and dad can make neat things to mail out to relatives across the street. =]
I'm another old fart who remembers Borland fondly. I learned to program with Turbo Pascal and went on to make good bucks churning out Paradox apps. They blew the port of Paradox to Windows disastrously but got back in my good graces with the brilliant debut of Delphi. They then proceeded to bloat it and overprice it outrageously. As to Linux, I gave Red Hat a good try but finally threw up my hands in despair at ever getting it to work well. I so wanted it to succeed for me. My guess is this merger will end up with Borland fading away for good and Corel losing itself in a lost focus never-never land. Right now I'd put my money on Mac OSX being the Unix-based OS that will succeed in stealing (a bit) of market share from Microsloth.
You know what is next...
Borland brand of tools *WILL NOT* be tied directly to any particular distribution. - Borland Developer
Maybe the market remembers how Cowpland totally screwed up the WP merger. That was practically the death of the company. This is exactly the same mistake they made before. Now their basically taking two dying technology companies, calling them linux companies, merging them, and trying to create something that can breath on its own. I'm not buying it. RedHat made a much better buy in cygnus for development tools IMHO. RedHat is pure linux play, where Corel is trying to ride the wave but is being pulled under by a history the preceeds Linux.
> The catch here is that Delphi is highly dependent on the Windows API. It is going to be very interesting to see what Corel does in order to make the port. They may have to invent their own desktop. Don't forget Borland is devloping a version of Delphi and C++Builder for Linux. It is codenamed Kylix and supposed to be out around the end of summertime.
Delphi and C++ Builder do share the same backend compiler. The front end compiler is different in the two products. - Borland Developer
The name of the Borland Devesion will be Borland. We are dropping the Inprise name.
"As far as I know, all that Borland has which sells at all is some development tools, which are slowly getting hammered by MS in the Windows market." Except for Borland C++ for OS/2 for which Borland burned the manuals, ground up the disks, wiped the hard drives, and denys to this day that it ever existed. Probably they did this because it didn't sell very well...right? NOT!
When your company can't survive the competitive Windows market..
Shouldn't that be "monopolized" Windows market?
I thought it would be "monopolised" Windows market.
But back to the topic, if Inprise can make Kylix work, Linux may get the major backing it really needs, and deserves to make it a viable alternative to M$
There are certain news in life that make you very happy. This is one of them. For about 10 years, OS/2 has been dead. And yet, IBM has decided to update the OS/2 Warp client once more. It's all about business. IBM made $92 millions last year with the sale of OS/2 (how much did RedHat loose?) and the show will go on. Here is the link: http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/news/0,4538,243412 0,00.html
MS Settled the lawsuit out of Court for an undisclosed sum.
Corel is just buying more distressed "hand me down" products from another failed business (Borland). They're starting to look like a second-hand "thrift" store.
Borland?
The makers of kick-ass development tools, that has (sadly) been in decline for the past few years?
Development tools? On Linux? That's always been Linux's greatest strength. Borland is like the _last_ company I'd expect a company that wants to be a Linux Power to aqquire.
I mean, how about:
- Adobe (Photoshop, font tech, PS/PDF, DTP tools)
- NewTek (Lightwave, an awesome 3D production tool)
- Sybase/Oracle (industrial strength DBMS)
- Lotus (123, Notes)
These make sense. But Borland?
The only reason I can see for buying Borland is that it's a good way to get a bing chunk of programmers all at once. But there's nothing I see attractive in the product line
There are currently two Open Source pascal projects:
;) so can target virtually any platform that GNU C can and is highly optimising. Supports a wide variety of Pascal standards. Somewhat compliant with Borland Pascal.
;). Both compilers are cross-platform and cross-processor which is a Good Thing(tm).
- Free Pascal: Written in itself, has a lot of extensions over "standard" Pascal which bring it _close_ to Borland Pascal. Available for a few non-x86 platforms.
- GNU Pascal: Written as a language front-end to GCC(GNU Compiler Collection
Neither of these compilers are in the same league as Borland Delphi. They are both staggeringly slow compared with the Borland compilers (OK, I can forgive GNU Pascal as it shares exactly the same back end as GCC). Neither compiler has adopted many Delphi-isms - which is good if you want a Borland Pascal look-a-like but lousy if you have 100k+ lines of Delphi (like me
When I looked at trying to improve these projects back in 96/97 the developers seemed less than enthusiastic about adopting Delphi constructs... YMMV.
Hmm... Given the existence of GCC, maybe they will open source or drop the compiler, and sell the IDE only instead.
;)
I hope not. The Borland compiler has a lot of advantages, the main one being speed. The Delphi 4 compiler will build my 100k line application from scratch in around 60sec on a PII-233+192MB RAM. An equivalent sized C application can take ~10mins (under Linux - much much more under Windows/Cygwin)....
GCC however is highly portable and can target many platforms and processors. Which is really neat....but you don't need (or want) an IDE to do that. Autoconf/Automake is your friend
Ooh, wow. Got some karma to burn, eh?
Yes, I know that sometimes all those mergers make me want to get down on my knees too, but unfortunately, I'm straight, male, and have to get to class now.
Later. Good luck getting out of the karma hole with your new account, "Daren Brantley".
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ooh, ouch. Don't like GCC, eh? :)
Well, you can always use RHIDE, (looks like a Borland product, in text mode, yay!)
FreePascal, (pretty complete, not quite there last I checked. But back then it was FPK Pascal or something)
and NASM. (looks kinda like TASM, for those of us who don't want to learn AT&T-style Assembler syntax, for one.)
Oh, and feel free to port the BGI interface. I ported some of it to SVGALib, so I could move my graphics hacks over. Of course, I used p2c, and hacked the output some, and compiled with egcs, but it's all good. And my stuff runs much better now. I just wish SVGALib had more primitives, like "floodfill"... *sigh*
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, that's what happens when you turn a C compiler into a C++ compiler. However, that's actually not nearly as bad as some implementations I've seen, believe it or not.
;)
Centerline's old "C++ compiler" didn't support boolean variables, true or false. I had to ifdef / define the darn things if I wanted to use them.
I'm not convinced that strong typing is a benefit, unless you can override it when necessary. However, I guess it helps catch errors if you know what types you want, and want speed. Lately, I've been using languages with pretty flexible types, and implementing something that *looks* like that in C++ is a real pain.
(pardon me while I override the + operator so it supports every combination of anything addition-like for every type, ever.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, the environment is definitely a separate chunk that can be made to work with the compiler(s). That's one thing I like about RHIDE.
I don't know how much of a market there would be for an X RAD tool, but I understand there are such things for FLTK and GTK. (?)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What, it prints out "Inf"? The "real compiler" I tried did the same thing. Of course, if you had a "real interpreter"... (contradiction in terms?)
(define main
(lambda (i x)
(if (= i 1000000000)
x
(main (add1 i) (* x x)))))
(main 0 3.14)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
How did you misinterpret my post as adoration for GCC? I just use it a lot.
.cc files to get it to work. Bleh.
GCC actually optimizes things decently on Intel, and your problems did not concern optimization, but rather scale. And I've seen worse C++ compilers, but GCC definitely does better as a C compiler. It also has a lot of unique flags to tune its behavior in both C and C++, which is a really good thing to investigate.
Also, last I checked, GCC optimization sucks on Solaris, and probably a few other platforms. But again, that wasn't even what you were talking about. (I think) Also, it's nice that GCC supports so many platforms, and allows its users to extend it. That's really its strength, and also why we have Linux in the first place.
But when I wrote some classes that used templates, I had to #include my
Also, I agree, RHIDE for Linux is pretty buggy. But the original, RHIDE for DOS is much better. (and it runs in DOSEmu. Go figure) Also, I *love* its info browser. That is a wonderful idea, making it just like the Borland Help.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe we *will* get to see all that Borland stuff ported to Linux. I hope Corel follows through on their good intentions.
Have we seen some little companies grow up and buy some big companies, or what? Compaq and Digital, AOL and Time Warner, and now this. It boggles the mind...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Corel is attempting to create a new market for non-technical Linux users for their office application with their distribution. This is a totally different market than the Borland development tools are attracting. Thus, I don't think tying the development tools to their distribution would make any economic sense.
What does (n/t) stand for?
Delphi is very popular around here, judging from traffic in the dk.* newsgroups, it is discussed as much as C/C++ and Visual Basic.
Actually, I was thinking about the Borland C/C++ compiler only, which is what is most clearly equivalent to GCC. I use both Borland C++ 5.0 and the GCC from Cygwin 1.0, and GCC generates 10% faster code. GNU ld, on the other hand, uses way to much memory (1 Gb for my project), and the debug information takes ridiculous amount of space. Linking is also a weak point for Borland C++.
Delphi is very different, GCC doesn't include a Pascal compiler yet, and as you say, the Delphi compiler is much faster. I agree dropping it for an alpha version of GNU Pascal would be ridiculous.
lcc doesn't have as many backends or frontends as gcc, but it should be a nice little C compiler.
Precompiled header support was developed by Cygnus, but apparently there was issues with the implementation, so it was never merged into gcc. Cygnus has now (sub-)contracted the job to a new person, who apparently work directly with the public gcc tree, rather than the internal Cygnus sources.
Or something like that.
Corel has until now been a user and (indirectly, through Cygnus contracts) a developer of GCC. They have paid Cygnus to implement various MS extensions for GCC, as well as support for precompiled headers. I hope this move does not mean they will use (and enhance) the proprietary Borland compilers instead.
Hmm... Given the existence of GCC, maybe they will open source or drop the compiler, and sell the IDE only instead.
Not really how Godwin's Law works, but I understand the sentiment.
The actual definition of Godwin's Law here.
--
Making iDirt 1.82 a safer place, one bug at a time.
Borland's version of the news here.
--
Making iDirt 1.82 a safer place, one bug at a time.
I was under the impression that gcc still didn't do this. Since I've got some rather large bits of C++ code that I compile fairly often, I'd be interested in activating this feature if it works. Do you have more information?
Thanks,
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Redhat and VA Linux are the future of computer companies. Corel/Borland is not.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
And close this discussion forthwith
Since Borland has 2.5 times Corel's revenues I'm not too worried about the dilution.
I for one am rooting for them. Hopefully they will keep raising the bar in the ease-of-use dept., pushing Red Hat and the other distros to continue to improve their product, too.
Speaking of Red Hat, I wonder if this was a "pre-emptive" buyout. If I were Corel, I would have harbored concerns that Red Hat, flush with cash, might have picked up Inprise/Borland themselves sooner or later. Not sure how that would have hurt Corel, though; just a thought.
First it was the graphics apps... Then they bought the Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, etc.
Most of these companies which Corel is buying are ones which Microsoft has passed on. Borland was the major IDE competitor before Visual 'x' surpassed them. Wordperfect was the #1 Wordprocessor before Lotus was killed and Word bundled Excel.
To spare the usual Anti-Microsoft rant, Corel has not been leveraging an OS to manipulate their competition.
Corel/Inprise is now doing something interesting and exciting on a cool platform. I hope the quality of their software reflects the talent they should be attracting.
Boosting WINE, and working on a common printing environment are noble spinoffs.
Actually as far as C goes GCC is really quite standards conforming. It supports tri-graphs, and lots of icky things that not all C compilers do. It has a lot of extensions, but all of them can be disabled by passing "-ansi -pendantic".
Of corse some of those disbleable extensions are now part of the recently-approved C99 standard, but GCC has more work to go on that front.
If you want to talk about C++ then that's another matter. A pretty mixed bag in fact. For example it was the first known C++ compiler to have exception support. It was also almost the last to enable that support by default (only turning it on within the last year!!).
Again it has a pile of extensions, again you can disable them all with the flick of a switch or two.
I don't see that adding more compilers to the mix will make GCC ditch any extensions, in fact I expect it will grab a few from the other compilers (some mix of the "best", most useful, most popular, and easyest to re-implment). It can't halp the "standardness" of the C implmentation, but it might give the C++ front-end a boost.
P.S. alot of the C++ extensions were added after much discussion in comp.lang.c++ about new pontental features. Some became standard, others, like typeof() should have, yet others have languished as they deserve.
Think about it for a minute - what products does Corel offer? Well first it was a Word processor/Business suite. Next they put together an OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system. Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's product mix.
Sure seems that MS is settting up to compete with MS across the spectrum.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
This brings up some interesting scenarios...
As software tools companies port their compilers to Linux, we risk getting into a situation similar to what exists in the Windows world...where there are a number of compilers available, each with its own quirks, libraries and special features.
Right now, go to metalab and download the source code for the linux app of your choice. It's a pretty safe bet that the app developer used the same compiler that you're using -- gcc. Possibly a different compiler version but same compiler essentially. Barring any incompatibilities between expected compiler versions or maybe kernel versions, you can be pretty sure that the app will build with little or no porting effort on your part.
In the Windows world, where you have compiler suites available from Microsoft, IBM, Watcom and Borland, just to name a few, it's not a given assumption that source code you download will even build in your environment. For instance, consider an app that's written to use the IBM OpenClass libraries...you'll have fun building it in a Microsoft Visual C++ environment. So even though the app itself might be open source, you're stuck installing pre-compiled binary version of it because you're unable to build the app yourself.
Let's hope this doesn't happen in the Linux community.
Borland/Inprise _was_ a successfull company some time ago. For me Turbo Pascal was the first programming language i learned on my PC and so it was for lots of user guys i know of. However, times have changed, AFAIK they have some difficult years, losses, freeing some staff. Why do you think they changed their name from Borland to Inprise, out of nothing?
there are/have been more than three office suites. there's star office, there was one given away free in magazine by some russian team, and i'm sure there are others i'm forgetting.
There always seems to be some sort of merger or acquisition going on in the software industry. But have there been any important demergers? (Apart from the mother of all demergers which might happen soon, depending on what the DOJ and courts decide.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
And according to Borland, the Linux port of delphi (which by the way is already being worked on) will include its own widget set (vcl clone) that will make the linux version of delphi more portable from windows. I doubt it will be perfect, but if you can carry 75% or more of your current work over...makes life allot easier.
I know I'll be first in line to get it. I'll even pay for it.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
I wrote a microcontroller C Compiler in C++, a
huge program. The code compiled perfectly under
OS/2 and winblows with IBM Visual Age for C++
and Borland C++. (Dos with Borland only)
When I went to convert it to work under Linux GCC
would generate core dumping code until I limited
the number of virtual functions I had.
I also had to cut my modules in 3 or 4 pieces
because GCC would barf, the code being too big.
GCC under Dos generates a file that is about
3 times large than that generated by either
Borland or IBM Visual for C++.
I would advise you to rethink your adoration
of GCC. It may not be a bad compiler but it
is not the best by a long shot, it is the only
one under Linux that is readily available. It's
optimization sucks big time.
Comeau C++ which is a good C++ Compiler but you
still need to use GCC. I use GCC because I don't
have a choice but whenever Borland C++ and/or
IBM Visual Age for C++ are available for Linux
I will not hesitate for one minute to buy either
one of them.
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
One of the more amusing aspects of this is that Quattro, which is the spreadsheet portion of the Corel Wordperfect Suite, was originally a Borland product, back when they made office applications.
I was acutaslly a big fan of Borland's apps, back in the DOS days. They had a kick-butt wordprocessor called Sprint that had a full-out EMACS emulation mode, and a very powerful macro language. It died, unlike Quattro,which was spun off to some other company (not sure if it was Corel directly).
Hmm... I think I may still have a copy of Borland's DOS version of Quattro... And, of course, Turbo-C totally rocked my world back in the day.
Sad how the mighty have fallen, but maybe they'll do better in the Linux market.
Borland went toe to toe with Microsoft and lost badly (I'm not saying the fight was fair). They never really recovered from that. Corel did the same thing, but were smart enough to know when to retreat - to the high ground of Linux. Otherwise, they would have been creamed just like Borland, antitrust trial or no antitrust. The markets apparently agree - while Corel's stock is no rocket, it's certainly done well this year and seems to have a lot more support than in the past.
Now, the best thing Corel could do with Inprise nee Borland would be to hurry along the release of Delphi - a lot of programmers are waiting for Delphi to show up on LInux before then finally defect from Windows. For such people (I know several personally) Linux will only be be seen as a real platform when it runs Delphi.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Don't forget StarOffice.
It's good to see an instance of a Canadian company (Corel) buying out a US company for a change.
Ignoring the fact that I like to think Corel is a company that does have good intentions, it simply wouldn't make sense for them to make it Corel Linux only. Sure it would boost the Corel Linux market share some, but I imagine they'd take a much larger hit in loss of sales from people who a) refuse to buy from a company that looks like it's trying to become the microsoft of the linux world and b) refuse to give up their current distro just so they can use some app that isn't really needed. I honeslty doubt they'd try to pull something like this. Also, I imagine if the ports do lean to one desktop/toolkit it will be kde/qt as they are used heavily in Corel Linux. Just a guess.
-matt
Historically any time one company buys another the stock of the buyer drops and the buyee goes up. So this was to be expected.
_ _____________________
I'm holding out though. I've got around $7K tied up on Corel stock right now. I think they are ripe to be acquired themselves. They have development tools, their own office suite, and their own distribution. My gut tells me that a Red Hat or VA equivalent is going to snatch them up soon.
---This routine borders on black magic. Touch it at your own peril.
_______________________________________________
"The code I write borders on black magic. Modify it at your own peril."
I wonder if this means that the forthcoming port of Delphi / C++ Builder will lean to GTK / Gnome?
Or, worse yet, will be Corel Linux only? That'd be very annoying.
Gotta keep an eye on these guys.
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
As so often happens, Linux folk seem to be unaware of the realities of non-Linux software and software companies.
1. Inprise, while no M$, is certainly not dying.
2. Interbase is, in fact, in widespread use in enterprise level and embedded applications.
3. The Java IDE may or may not be inferior to that of IBM, but IBM has an abysmal performance record at marketing good software, or of remaining committed to it. Remember OS2?
No, you don't get it. Real commercial software products are not built by macho C programmers who refuse to use a RAD tool, but by programmers who select tools for the productivity they provide, and for the ease of production of solid programs.
Visual environments, for the most part, make the programming of the UI a task so formidable that it dwarfs tha actual application code in many cases. Delphi, C++ Builder, and JBuilder all put the UI development where it belongs: in a simple and quick IDE which lets the programmer focus on coding application code, not UI code.
My only concern with this deal is that Corel may lessen the commitment to continued support for the Windows development language tools. You do remember Windows, don't you? It's that OS which many of us pragmatists do hate, but which still dominates the desktop market.
--- Bill
WP peaked at 5.1 for DOS, which was an unmitigated piece of crap with a horribly inconsistent and byzantine set of function keys. The show codes function which I always heard praised was there because they never figured out how to clean up after themselves.
WP was, at least through the 6.1 version for Windows, a horrible, bug-ridden disaster which I used only under extreme duress.
Not that Word is the holy grail, either. Actually, the single most productive word processing tool I have ever used was Borland Sprint.
--- Bill
OH SHUT UP ALREADY!
You don't like it, leave. You know what he/she meant.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Corel has been around as long as I can remember. Back when I was coding in Turbo C++ 1.0 for DOS, I was also using CorelDraw. And before CorelDraw, Corel was into SCSI drivers and stuff.
Anm
Well, then that's your problem. Don't come whining to us about it.
Unless you're trying to be a parody, in which case it didn't come off too well...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Ironically enough, a good part of Corel's office suite came from Borland originally --- Paradox and Quattro Pro were both Borland products that got sold to Corel when we couldn't turn a profit on them.
It's normal during buyouts for the buying company's stock to drop and the stock of the company being bought to rise --- CORL dropping right now is nothing to worry about.
It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
Really? I hadn't noticed that.
--Robert West
--Delphi R&D
Delphi will not suffer stagnation. :)
The delay in the Delphi patch was related to a delay in the release of C++Builder.
More details than that i'm not willing/able
to give you at this time --- ask me at the
conference.
I'm not sure what to think of this. It kind of saddens me if Borland will lose their name and become Corel. I was really looking forward to Kylix (Delphi/Builder for Linux), and I wrote them a detailed e-mail with suggestions on how to make it successful (not sure if they care what _I_ have to say, though). I explained that it would be best if they released their compiler and command line tools free of charge and charge for the development environments (this way OSS projects would still be possible.. distribute the Delphi source and they can use bcc to compile it). I also explained how important it was for Linux devlopers to have choice (in desktop environments and GUI toolkits).
I was happy to hear that Borland would indeed be releasing their command line tools free of charge, but what about the GUI stuff? I hope Corel won't be using this to have Borland only make Kylix work for KDE/Qt rather than GNOME/gtk+ (or whatever combination). I don't, however, think that Corel would be stupid enough to make Kylix a Corel-distro required thing. Now I'm also worried that they'll do the winelib thing with Kylix for some reason.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
http://dailynews.y ahoo.com/h/nm/20000207/tc/corel_inprise_2.html
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I may be wrong, but I see Unix in general, and Linux specifically, as one huge development environment.
So do I, and many others. Indeed, that was one of the main goals for the OS back when Unix was being written in the early 1970s. However, there is no reason you cannot add more tools to that environment, such as Borland's offerings.
I don't know how much Borland can add to the C/C++ tools, and I doubt there's room for another scripting language. Is Delphi all they have?
Borland's development tools are very nice to work with. Their VCL (GUI framework) is the best I've ever used. Elegant and easy. You can use their visual form editor to drag-n-drop, but you can also write it in code -- or both. The IDE detects changes you make to the code it writes, and back-updates any data files it needs.
I would really like to see C++Builder on Linux. Delphi, too. I like Object Pascal for its clean design. It isn't a standard, nor is it portable, unfortunately, which limits its uses in "real world" code, but I find it fun to play with, if nothing else. And Borland has a number of other products as well, in the database, Java, and CORBA markets.
So, yes, I think this could work. Will it? I don't know. If I could predict the future, I wouldn't need to work on computers for a living. :-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If i'm not mistaken didn't MS buy a whole load of borland stock recently?
I'm sure they won't object though since with a company in charge that is pushing Linux, development of windows apps may slow which can only be good for MS. Of course if borland do get good cross-platform tools then it could be considered a big threat.
-- "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
You think Corel is just a Linux company? Well, I guess I can't blame you, because that's what they want people to think.
Just go to their website, I'm sure they list some other products you may have heard of. Like WordPerfect. And "Corel Draw". Etc. They've been around for a while--probably 10 years.
--
Java banners:
Bad for users because Java kills Netscape
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
It's true that they were trading at $4 - $6 but they were very undervalued at that price. I feel that the current 12-15 price range is much more fair.
I owned some Inprise stock (actually bought it when it was Borland) for a number of years and it was quite a bumpy ride. The main problem for Inprise was total and comlete turmoil in management. CEO's and CFO's coming and going, name chage ( I prefered Borland ) etc... They are a company that is floundering in a major way IMHO. Even though I ended up with a 50% profit I'm very happy to put that behind me.
I really can't see how they can justify 2.4 billion for a company with a market cap of 782 mill. Just plain nuts if you ask me.
You can try Free Pascal. It 99% compatible with tp7. And it has already a lot of Delphi features like classes RTTI, exceptions, ansistrings and FCL (Free Component Library).
Free Pascal can be found at http://www.freepascal.org
Two projects developping a GUI can be found at:
http://www.kcl.freepascal.org/
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Corel was also making SCSI interface products before CorelDraw! came along.
- Adobe (Photoshop, font tech, PS/PDF, DTP tools)
Most of their products are direct competitors to Corel products. The font technology would be nice but it's easier to just license it or get a font server that supports Type-1.
- NewTek (Lightwave, an awesome 3D production tool)
Corel is aiming at the office/desktop market. 3D production is probably too specialized.
- Sybase/Oracle (industrial strength DBMS)
They are getting Interbase from Borland/Inprise. Not as industrial strength, but not as hard to manage for the end user. And I don't think Oracle will be bought by anyone.
- Lotus (123, Notes)
Too late. IBM already bought them. Domino is available for Linux now. Corel has already demoed Quattro Pro on Linux.
If you don't see what is attractive in the product line, then you don't know much about Borland. Apparently you didn't know they had a database product, nor that Delphi is the #1 requested software package on Linux Journal's software Wishlist.
Story
The new company will be called Corel, but I think that the name you were concerned about would be Corel-Inprise/Borland. (Mathematical result left as an exercise for the reader)
The Reuters story says "Inprise/Borland sells development tools for Linux." As if those companies only had a history of Linux products. How amusing.
I'm a Delphi programmer. I was just asked at my work my opinion about what this means for Delphi. Here's a fragment of an email with my take on it. There's some thoughts on Corel as well that might help you understand why this happened.
:-)
:-)
------------------------------------
Corel is a company that knows very well how to side-step Microsoft. They are non-competitive with Microsoft, as you say, because it would be stupid to do so directly, as Borland found out, twice, first with office tools and then with development tools. At any rate, that sidestepping paid out in the long run - not only did they survive "the big Windows Desktop and Devtool wars" without nearly as many bruises as Borland, they still have all the products they ever did, and they ended up (counting their own Linux distribution and now the Visibroker and Borland development tools) with a cradle-to-grave solution that involves absolutely no Microsoft products (or products from any other vendor for that matter).
In addition, it's hard to find any other company with such a large scope of products (from OS to Enterprise to Desktop) except for Sun Microsystems and possibly IBM on their Unix market. It's actually kind of amazing to see them actually pulling it off. I see a Michael Cowpland book on the horizon.
Since Delphi and C++ Builder) for Linux are not products that are out yet, but are in development now (albeit in early stages from what I've been able to extract from Inprise Linux people I've talked to), it will be very interesting to see if they will open source them (as they have behaved with their wine move and other things) to increase the rate of development while freeing some of their Delphi people to bugfix them. It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
In my opinion, Delphi suffered more when Borland lost over half of their Delphi team to Microsoft's Visual Basic team in the infamous "limousine lunch invitations" by "The Dead Borlanders Society" of Seattle - which prompted a lawsuit that was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount - than they are suffering here.
In any case Delphi in particular has already been suffering somewhat (in my opinion) from their concentration on Java development and CORBA/Java integration. The entropy is much higher from Delphi 3 to 5 (mainly because Delphi 3 to 4 was huge) than from Delphi 1through 3, even though 1 was 16-bit and 2 was a complete rewrite.
I'm definitely not saying that it will be a good thing for the next iteration of the product, but in the future, you'll have to remember that Unix people in general tend to care more about infrastructure than wizards. That change of view will probably be very healthy for the product in general, especially considering that the last two versions of Delphi have been feeling in general less stable and the do-it-yourself-with-code functionality is starting to go missing in newer features - so it's not just "don't use the wizard, it doesn't work right", it's "don't use the feature at all"... Delphi would be well served by a year of bugfix-only development in the manner of Sun's JDK1.3.
So all in all, I think it's actually "neutral" news from our perspective, at least until we see what the plans are (not that Delphi was a high priority in Borland anymore anyway). Now it would be good news if they GPLd Visibroker, which strategically is a smart thing to do (depending on how much revenue they're getting from it after factoring in all the Corel product revenue). Now = that = would save us some money.
Just my opinion from the Delphi front,
----------------
My opinions are mine of course, they don't represent the opinions of my employer, my cats, or slashdot
- No Sig Today
When your company can't survive the competitive Windows market..
Shouldn't that be "monopolized" Windows market?
+&x
I may be wrong, but I see Unix in general, and Linux specifically, as one huge development environment. This merger might make sense if essential stuff like a C compiler were missing, but it isn't. And the Unix development environment is basically what most Unix developers want to use, isn't it?
I don't know how much Borland can add to the C/C++ tools, and I doubt there's room for another scripting language. Is Delphi all they have? I think something like Delphi would be nice to see, though I can't see myself using it much.
And it's hard to justify buying an entire corporation by the potential of one tool even if it's a very useful one.
So does anyone have any clue what the real purpose behind this is?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I guess since Corel's going to buy Borland/Inprise, and since Microsoft has vested interest in Borland/Inprise, you could actually say that Microsoft is vested in a piece of Corel. :)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
WordPerfect's Windows market share is around 15% in the US retail channel and has been slowly rising.. I'd hardly call this getting "hammered." Sure, MS has a far dominant share, but Corel is holding its own, and is even making some inroads. Obviously, though, they are never going to break out on Windows to the point that they're beating MS, and that's where Linux comes in.
If you recall, Quark tried to take over Adobe a year and a half ago. Adobe is valued at something like one and a half billion dollars, and Quark (itself half the size of Adobe) was too small to take them over. What makes you think (relatively puny) Corel would succeed?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Since when are they a Internet access software and services firm?? Am I missing something here? I picture them as a development tool provider. I don't think I've ever purchased internet access software from them or even services (except for tech support, but that doesn't count).
I think they are going to be keeping the same name, according to the article on yahoo"The new combined company, to be called Corel, "
``This gives us a real end-to-end solution from tools all the way to the suite on Linux and gives us clearly the largest set of Linux technology from any company,''
So has anyone really used the corel dist in a dedicated server environment? (And if so why no just use Debian..) e.g. the "end-to-end" statement, from all that i've seen corel linux is more focused on business desktop users. This merger will certainly help them there, bring them more applications with which to _sell_ and/or package with their distribution.
-lanux
Cowpland: C-O-W-P-L-A-N-D.
---
"Corel announced today that Peter Norton, original author of Norton Utilities, has been terminated with an undisclosed severance package"
The newly acquired Norton/Symantec/Inprise products will be renamed as follows:
Copeland Commander
Copeland Guide
Copeland Ghost 5.2
Copeland Utilities
The new package artwork revealed shows Michael Copeland in a white dress shirt with arms crossed and at his side, his wife Marlen sporting a risqué dress made up of recycled XT motherboards.
---
CORL stock dropped on the news. I'm not sure why. They seem to be all the right stuff right now for the big desktop Linux distribution. I could see them becoming the largest supplier of Linux to corporate desktops in the US, and perhaps even take a good fraction out of MS in the next couple of years.
Wasn't Redhat planning to buy Corel? Along with VA/Andover and Pokemon of course.... :)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
David Intersimone and John Kaster of Borland Developer Relations have repeatedly and strongly stressed that Windows development will continue and that it is key to their business plan. They say Linux is "additive". Windows products are the bulk of their revenues. Why would they give that up?
Thank Goodness.
Once upon a time Corel announced support for OS/2. About a day later, they dropped it. I personally do not trust Cowpland, however I truly hope that this works out.
MSFT has preferred shares in Borland/Inprise as a result of having to settle out of court for something like $100 million - they had raided Borland/Inprise for their engineers and got sued for it. This is preferred stock, so it's non-voting.
But, yes, they will make out like Bandits in the buyout. Never underestimate the ability of MSFT to make money.
Will in Seattle
This happens all the time. Usually, a good time to pick up a stock you've been wanting is a few days after an announced takeover attempt by it. The time to sell a takeover target is usually after it's been announced as a takeover.
[note - I own INPR shares]
Basically, the market is reacting to the difficulty and expense in merging a different organization into the buyer, while realizing that the buyee may be worth more than they thought.
An example would be the continual wars between American Home Products (AHP), Pfizer (PFE), Abbot Labs (ABT), and such. My shares in Pfizer and Abbot Labs keep bouncing up and down as everyone gets into this continual takeover spin.
Some companies, such as Cisco Systems (CSCO) specialize in rapid turnarounds of other companies. My shares in this don't seem to fluctuate in response to news of a takeover by Cisco as a result, since the shareholders "know" that Cisco can absorb the other company at little cost and at maximum profit.
Will in Seattle
They've got it all now -- an Operating System, an Office Suite, and Development Tools. Obviously their pitch to system vendors is "bundle our whole package, it works best together!"
Not a bad plan... I just hope they keep Win32 Delphi around..
Considering that Inprise/Borland is luck to still be in business (and always seems to be on the verge of another crisis), it doesn't seem that strange.
Remember, Phillipe Kahn (sp?) almost drove Borland into the ground trying to be another Microsoft (buying WordPerfect and Ashton-Tate) instead of concentrating on Borland's key strengths. (Novell is another company that tried the same strategy and hasn't been as strong since).
Corel bought WordPerfect from Borland for a song; they're just picking up the rest of the company now.
I thought that Microsoft would have bought them (esp since they already owned part), but the anti-trust issues probably prevented that.
Oops, you're right. Borland had their own word processor that never really gained any market share.
But Borland did waste too much time and money trying to compete against Microsoft in too many areas (Dev tools, business apps, databases). If they would have stuck to those they were the strongest in, Borland would probably be a strong (independent) company today.
I wonder if this means a big push for Borland Pascal/Delphi on Linux. Can someone who is familiar with Pascal say how GNU Pascal compares with Borland Pascal ATM?
Remember that Visual Basic was the big thing that got Windows a critical mass of apps (and some would say that "critical" describes many VB apps perfectly). Pascal on Linux *could* become popular, depending on Borland/Corel's marketing strategy.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Corel's office suite is one of the three most popular office suites available (Lotus' is another one), though it is slowly getting hammered by MSOffice in the Windows market.
As far as I know, all that Borland has which sells at all is some development tools, which are slowly getting hammered by MS in the Windows market.
Both companies have been unable to compete with MS on Windows. Both could potentially do well out of the Linux market. The new combined company must surely be relying on the Linux market for salvation.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Companies like this are barely surviving. The media goes crazy when they here these "big mergers" that will challenge Microsoft. Ha! I say.
Being an ex-Amiga user I understand the passions behind Linux and the anti-Microsoft movement, but you have to analyze your opponent wisely.
Ever use Borland's JBuilder? What an utter piece of garbate. Let's face it, Microsoft is far from perfect, but they do make some good software (not all of it, but some of it).
This all-or-nothing approach will be the death of any company that stands to compete with MS. As Ballmer once said, "You gotta ride the bear."
Sorry to be pedantic but if you actually read the Yahoo article it specifically says, "The new combined company, to be called Corel...." and anyway wouldn't that be Corel-Inprise-Borland?
Ok...the markets are /really/ wacky now.
Borland has been around a long time and has a very large and successful product line. How long has Corel been around, and what does it have besides a relatively recent Linux distro? It would seem to me to make more sense the other way around, Borland buying Corel. Not saying it's good or bad...just weird.
I expect tomorrow Winzip (Niko Mak) will buy Microsoft in order to leverage their product.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, it looks like a good thing on the surface. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how this deal turns out.
One thing I can see is that the both of them gain a list of customer contacts and get to share the intellectual resources of the staff working on the various programming projects. This could be a very good thing as it could allow projects to be finished sooner (potentially) and have a larger customer base to market products to.
I suppose, however, that the thing could also go sour fast if things aren't handled right.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
COREL is buying Inprise for less than its recent high prices, but the prices still includes a significant recent added "Linux premium"
Prior to October, Inprise had been trading in the $4 - $6 range for over a year.
As a result, some investors may feel Inprise got the better end of the deal.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
what products does Corel offer? . . . a Word processor/Business suite [and a] OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system.
Everyone in the press and here keep talking about the developer tools as the big addition to Corel's inventory, but I think it really the ASP Server software and InterBase database backend that are the real future. The developer tools combined with COREL's WINE enhancement will be a big benefit to the Linux community, but from a business standpoint, the one-two punch of client OS/Office Suite + Server OS/database backend is the real money maker. Add-in the benefits of Corel's relationship with ASP client developer GOJO, and Inprise Application Server, and you're talking a great business model.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Either the Office Suite division (WordPerfect, QuattroPro, etc.) or the Graphics division (Draw, PhotoPaint, etc.). With today's purchase of Inprise/Borland, Corel has made it's bed in the Linux camp and their resources are spread too thin to cover all of these bases. Adobe Systems would be a great purchase of the graphics division.
Has anyone seen any kind of statement from Inprise/Borland that they are going to continue producing Windows development tools? I'd love to go 100% linux today, but I'm not going to be able to get all my customers to leave windows anytime soon. And until they do, I'll be using Delphi to build windows apps. I wonder what this is going to Delphi/C++ Builder support of Microsoft "standards". The recent addition of ADO support to Delphi has really helped performance of MS SQL database apps. And the ISAPI support is really good too.
I've been drooling of the prospect of having Delphi on Linux (aka Kylix (which also is a C++ environment). Our shop uses Delphi exclusively (on Windows (yuk)). I gave up C++ when Delphi became available (say what you want) simply because it gave the ease of development of VB with almost as much power as C++. Our products work and ship ahead of schedule. We owe that to Delphi being as well designed and capable as it is.
Linux development really demands knowing the internals of Linux AND the graphical libraries that are out there (not that this is bad, mind you). Being able to hide this complexity from the developer while providing the rich and full feature set of Delphi will only enhance the Linux development experience.
The only downsides I can see from this move is that Borland essentially redefined Pascal for the Windows environment. As such, it set a standard for Pascal which is not the same as the one everyone else is familiar with. This will mean that Open Sourced code will not be compilable by other pascal compilers.
The other is that there will be an infusion of garbage programs written by programmer wannabees.
However, the end result, I believe, will be more high quality and appropriately priced (or free) applications for Linux and, potentially, other *nix's. That can only be a good thing for power users and business/causual users alike.
RD
Corel Drrrrrrrraw buys Bugland? And aim $2B on
Linux? Anyone care to share transition plan from
Linux to *BSD? Really, I've been using Bugland's
tools for years on a daily basis, up to D4, and I
can tell you that it's a damn bloated buggy memory
hog. And yes, WP 8, `productivity tool'.... Hehe,
join any Linux newbie group and hear people WOEING
about damn thing. They have enough pain with it,
and dump it, and get back to Windoze. But distro
maker doesn't care- they already got their money. Video kills the radio star.
KuroiNeko
In no way. Inprise degraded from the one and only
vendor of development tools to corba-schmorba
supplier. Corel used to make not excellent, but
sometimes useable, graphics package. They both
lost the battle in their fields and now trying to
re-gain strategic heights with the help of Linux.
Their $2B is merely an air, they have no skilled
personnel or great know-how behind them.
Loosers. Forever. They can shake the boat and
get JR Luser on their side. For day or two. And this hype makes me sick. I want my *BSD. Now.
KuroiNeko
Get real, man. This is a share-healing hype for
Corel and Inprise, not advertisement of Linux.
I doubt there's a suit who never heared about Linux,
it's been even in FinnAir in-flight zine. So
what? Do _you_ feel any better now?
KuroiNeko
At least TP/TC are public domain now. FPK is :)
doing very well, you can still use Pascal. But
hey, this is just syntax. My first language was
Pascal, and there was a time I really hated to
wirte a line in C. These days I just don't care.
C? Pascal? Perl? Here you are. Zillions of lines
of hi quality code, docs, examples and help.
Welcome to proframmers' paradise
KuroiNeko
At least TP/TC are public domain now. FPK is :)
doing very well, you can still use Pascal. But
hey, this is just syntax. My first language was
Pascal, and there was a time I really hated to
wirte a line in C. These days I just don't care.
C? Pascal? Perl? Here you are. Zillions of lines
of hi quality code, docs, examples and help.
Welcome to programmers' paradise
KuroiNeko
....keep in mind that _you_ can change the things.
Give your preference to alternative solutions,
explain others, what is your choice, and why, be
carefull about the way your money goes. Vendors
are there to satisfy customers' needs, not buyers
are to fill corporate pockets. Vote with your
money. Don't buy into Sunday column hype, make
your research and make _your_ choice. No one can
serve two masters. If board thinks too much about
share surge, they don't care about product quality anymore. We all have seen this. Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra?!
KuroiNeko
I'm going to have to kiss Delphi goodbye, and it won't be easy.
Goodbye Turbo Pascal, goodbye Dephi. I will miss you. ::: sniff :::
Other companies (Redhat, VA Linux) have shown that they understand how to maintain the goodwill of the open source community. Eric Raymond's article The Magic Cauldron spells out several ways to make money in open source. I'd like to know more about Corel's plans, but I think we'll just have to wait and watch. They have certainly done the right things on Wine, so I'm hopefully that we will see more good things from them in the future.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
With such a large stake in Linux and products for the platform, they may wanna gain more control over it.
Have you ever read the an_a_l-retentive copyright notices in Corel and Borland's releases? It made me throw up and junk the crap.
They've played the proprietary, hooks in the flesh of the installed base, game even harder than Microsoft. That's undoubtedly one of the foremost reasons why they lost; because fewer people let themselves get trapped.
They are losers, and like all losers they haven't learned at all. I'm sure they are thinking out ways to go back to what they did before, using Linux to get there.
"It's also a convenient way out of our US anti-trust problems - rather than being subject to the Justice Department, we're now dealing with the State Department and the Pentagon, who are much more flexible. It's possible we'll still have to divest Quebec, but c'est la guerre."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm fairly excited to hear this news, because I imagine this means that Corel will make sure that Inprise's JBuilder Enterprise Edition makes it to the Linux platform.
I'm in the midst of a fairly heavy Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based development project and have been for the most part displeased with Sun's Forte for Java, one of the only commercial-level Java IDE's available for Linux (that I know of). They have decent module support for the J2EE features (Servlets, EJBs, JDBC, RMI, etc.) but the IDE is sloooooow.
Inprise has recently made JBuilder Foundation (i.e. Lite) available for Linux, but that lacks the support for the J2EE stuff and doesn't quite fit the bill. JBuilder EE, however, is currently only available for Windoze and Solaris.
On that note, maybe I'm getting unnecessarily excited. Are there any J2EE-capable development environments currently available for Linux that can handle multi-party development and all that good stuff? Might I just be best off with Emacs + CVS? Maybe an "Ask Slashdot" is in order for this one....
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
Corel-Inprise-Borland...
CIB...
Coders in Black...
I wish I could provide a link on this - I will scrounge for one. I used to work on the VS team, though.
As I recall, MS played hardball with Borland awhile back. Essentially, MS scooped up some of Borland's key backend compiler gurus by offering them enormous amounts of $$. This really had a detrimental effect on Borland's success and at the same time, improved the Microsoft compiler line.
Not very friendly eh?
SEAL
Looks like Microsoft's methods of recruiting weren't entirely kosher either.
Best regards,
SEAL
On the good side, we should see some more professional visual development tools for linux. On that bad side, they will probably change the name again. Coral-Inprise-Borland sounds more like a law office than a software division.
This is not a Troll, but ...
... any day!
...
...
Borland always produced better programming tools than Microsoft. You can take it anyway you want, but a Delphi outperforms any VB and VC++
Again, this is not a Troll but
Corel always tried to play in the office application kindergarden. They bought Wordperfect and had a hard time with it.
The thing is that Corel and Borland had their best programmers "stollen" by Microsoft. More money offered. Now that they are together, they might have a better chance.
We shall see
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
There's a webcast of the announcement (if you can bear the tedium!) at www.borland.com at 16.30 GMT.
Probably (IMPO) the usual 'we're really jazzed we could get together.' stuff as opposed to analysis, but there you go.
________________
'There are no black cats, only black cat - shaped holes in the universe.'
-Arundhati Roy
Golf; a good walk spoiled. -Mark Twain
Corel has shown that they will support Linux and that they have intentions of making money from it. This is good for Corel and it's good for Linux.
Linux will benefit from having another "Powerhouse" distribution (in addition to Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware) to compete with the strong companies in the Microsoft world.
Corel will benefit because it is becoming a major player in the Linux game. Attaboy Corel. Keep bring Linux to the desktop.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Corel was originally a custom software provider, focusing on the Canadian federal government, in the mid-1980s. In the late 80s Corel developed a graphics package named Corel Draw! (they used to add an exclamation point to all their products) as a companion tool for Xerox Ventura Publisher. The original version of Corel Draw! shipped with a Microsoft Windows 2.15 runtime--Corel Draw! 1.0 was how I first bought Windows.
In 1991 Corel bought the Ventura Software division from Xerox. Corel attempted to package several graphics package bundles, but their development efforts were hampered by both sales and programming obstacles. (The big programming obstacle was that Ventura Publisher was an assembly-language hack--no documentation, and the original programmer was long gone.)
Mike Cowpland (rhymes with "hope-land") of Corel has worked very hard at being a wheeler-dealer. He has bought a couple of well-regarded names for lots of Corel stock and very little cash--he bought WordPerfect (but not WordPerfect's payroll) from Novell for a lot of stock but only about $10 million in cash in the mid-90s. In this transaction he's "buying" Borland with newly-issued stock and no cash. (This transaction dilutes the shareholders interests by 44%--but doesn't cost Corel a dime.)
(FWIW: I used to be a tech support forum sysop on Ventura Software's CompuServe forum. I used to do technical illustration of children's books using Corel Draw.)
The lifestyle of the boss can suck energy from a creative organization. I've heard that Cowpland likes status symbols. It signals about a big ego and needs for hierarchy. A creative organization works best when the hierarchy is low. Cowpland is a burden to Corel.
I'm not terribly surprised about the purchase. Remember the WordPerfect/Borland joint venture which resulted in "Borland Office." Novell bought it and sold it to Corel. There are a lot of historical ties here.
...)
Of course, there are also ideological ties -- the universal "us vs. Microsoft" one. Each of these joint venture players had their market shares eaten away by Microsoft. Ideology follows the people.
Linux represents a huge opportunity for anyone with the flexibility to move fast enough. Microsoft has already shown that they respond too slowly to innovation. The fact that this purchase is happening now says something about what they expect the Linux market to do in the near future and that there is money to be made while Microsoft "wakes up." (Remember Microsoft's initial response to the Internet
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Your memory must be fading in your old age, Corporal. In the first war, you were on the Western front, and in the second, you never made it to any front. I guess nostalgia isn't what it was in your day, eh?
Good advice, though, especially about winter. I'll be looking forward to more of it.
See what I've been reading.
I'm hopeful that Corel (which has good name recognition amongst the non-techie) with the
company-formerly-known-as-Borland can provide the
first true, end-to-end competition with the
Windows giant.
If they drive great development tools (especially
Delphi) into th market, with th ability to market with a distribution, well, I think that's a winning combination.
Another superpower? could we be seeing the rise of Linux based communities to positions of power? They own Word Perfect, and now they own Borland. They have a C++ prog, which could have implications on programs like cc and gcc. What other programs does Boreland make, as I forget?
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
I watched a bobsleigh competition on TV yesterday, and Corel was one of the sponsors. On almost every sleigh, there was a big "Corel Linux" logo, right at the front. I think that was pretty fun, I've never seen any Linux ads on TV before anyway.
Besides the obvious intent to offer all things desktop in Linux land, this acquisition has an extra level of intrigue in that Inprise is one of the very few companies besides Corel with significant revenues selling Windows corporate desktop software.
Is Corel also hoping to take a bigger piece of the post-DoJ Windows software market?
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
So this is what they meant when one of the guys at the booth said to me... "We keep changing our name."
Ever since I heard that Borland intended to port Delphi and Builder under Linux I wondered if they had the financial power to resist to a tremendous pressure that's been lying above their heads lately. And, of course, by this I mean Microsoft.
Furthermore, their only chance to succeed in the Linux World is to release the products for free (or almost) and if possible open sourced. Because otherwise there are other IDE's that are more interesting. Take for example Kdevelop - it doesn't provide the same features as Builder, it is less powerful, but it is released under GPL, it started really well and it's only a matter of time to achieve the functionality of Builder. In this situations, who'd want a similar, more expensive product ?
Corel, has the means to make Delphi and Builder a part of their distribution, and this would be a big advantage for them. I, for one, I would think of buying it only because of Builder. I know, the development tools don't make a distribution, but for me they are very important. And Builder is great.
As you can see one can wonder of what will happen in the (near) future.
Will Corel speed-up the porting of Delphi and Builder ?
Will they continue to release Windows versions of the above mentioned IDE's ?
How are they going to deal with the portability ? Because even if I find the VCL very well designed (and complete too), I don't think it is actually very portable. Will Qt be an option ?
I certainly hope these questions will have an aswer really soon 'cause I'm very curious.
Many folks have posted their surprise at Inprise-Borland being valued at $2.44B...in fact, if you read the press release closely (and check the companies individually), the value of the *combined* enterprise will be $2.44B
DaBuddha
A rdbms no one uses.
A java ide inferior to ibm's.
I'm sure there is more but borland/inprise doesn't seem like the best deal around.
But then again isn't 2.4 bn $ kind of no money at all compared to other companies (like what is it Yahoo has that merits it's value).
As usual I don't get it.
Like if I had 2.4 bn $ I bet I could become a world player in something real like ballbearings or rubber. I wouldn't spend it on some dying IT company (or maybe I would , it feels like I don't know shit anymore). I bet everyone needs ballbearings and rubber but who need borland?
I think Corel and VA are on a collision course. Corel with closed source tools and VA with opensource tools (I've never heard anyone use the word opensource as much as Augustin). And lets not forget about Red Hat and Cygnus.
There is a lot of money involved here, and a lot of companies that are trying to trump Micro$oft. Whatever happens it'll be interesting, however, in the end I still think the business ethic will mean that things won't get a whole lot better.
Am I alone in thinking that companies like Netscape and Corel who release closed source apps for Linux and then trumpet themselves as Linux powerhouses just don't get it.
AbiWord, Gnumeric. KOffice...the future of productivity apps is free software and that's free as in free speech.
Patrick
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It looks like Michael Cowpland's fat ego is on a roll again. His lousy stock makes a slight move and he thinks he owns the world. I used to work at Corel. Everytime Cowpland opened his mouth or made a strategic move everyone froze in fear.
suck a cock.