I *really* don't understand this
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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
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· 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
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· 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
Foogle
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· 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."
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.
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!
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.
Sure seems that MS is settting up to compete with MS across the spectrum.
Uhh, the primary problem with MS is that it uses it's dominance in diverse product lines so that it doesn't have to compete.
A "new, little" MS to compete with the "old, big" MS is exactly what we need.
-Jordan Henderson
Effects of having multiple C compilers?
by
sector
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· 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.
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.)
3COM is splitting off the Palm division, who will be having their IPO real soon now.
--
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Corel played the game better
by
SurfsUp
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· 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.
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.
I think this is very cool
by
DragonHawk
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· 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.
Re:Inprise traded at $4 for years, now at $14
by
Zoltar
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· 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
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· 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/
Borland, famous Linux company
by
SEWilco
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· 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.
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
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.
Why stocks (CORL) drop when they buy out others
by
WillAffleck
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· 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.
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.
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
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· 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...
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.
Database backend and ASP Server key to deal
by
Cy+Guy
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· 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.
Re:Corel stocks drops on the news
by
hedgehog_uk
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· 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.
What will they open source?
by
dsplat
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· 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.
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
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· 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.)
Both a Linux AND a Windoze play?
by
re-geeked
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· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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!
And close this discussion forthwith
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.
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
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.
It's good to see an instance of a Canadian company (Corel) buying out a US company for a change.
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.
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/
The Reuters story says "Inprise/Borland sells development tools for Linux." As if those companies only had a history of Linux products. How amusing.
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
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.
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
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"'
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.
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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 - $6 range for over a year.
As a result, some investors may feel Inprise got the better end of the deal.
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what products does Corel offer? . . . a Word processor/Business suite [and a] OS package for the end user. The last piece of the puzzle is development languages/Data Base system.
Everyone in the press and here keep talking about the developer tools as the big addition to Corel's inventory, but I think it really the ASP Server software and InterBase database backend that are the real future. The developer tools combined with COREL's WINE enhancement will be a big benefit to the Linux community, but from a business standpoint, the one-two punch of client OS/Office Suite + Server OS/database backend is the real money maker. Add-in the benefits of Corel's relationship with ASP client developer GOJO, and Inprise Application Server, and you're talking a great business model.
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I really can't see Red Hat buying Corel. RH already has development tools from Cygnus and, of course, a popular distro. Why should they buy more of the same (except to get an office suite)?
VA buying Corel would maybe make more sense. I suspect strongly that VA wants to make the big league (and I think they will) and Corel could help them achieve this. However having a distribution, tools, apps etc. tied to a single hardware vendor might not be such a good idea.
I think that (unlike RedHat), Corel is maybe aiming at being the M$ 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.
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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.
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Corel-Inprise-Borland...
CIB...
Coders in Black...
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.
________________
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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.)
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.