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Corel Buys MetaCreations' Graphical Tools
Bauwolf writes "According to MacCentral,
Corel has bought some of MetaCreations' graphics products. Does this mean I'll have Painter running on my Linux box and Kai's Power Tools plugins for the Gimp soon?" Don't forget Bryce.
72 dpi is only 'standard' on Macs, specifically older ones with fixed frequency monitors. It's all highly dependant on your monitor and resolution anyway, so it's a super moot point unless you are importing MacPaint files from 1986 or something.
Windows and Linux have variable display DPI. MacOS X will probably have it too.
(There was an old typographic measurement unit that was about 1/72 of an inch, but that's pretty much obsolete for DTP.)
well let me start off by saying I hate poser with a passion (crappy interface, weird oddities with its IK support, way to impresice)
with that out of the way...
there are severl NURBS modeling programs for linux. Blender (which has bones support if I remember, though I freaking hate the interface), and some other NURBS modeling program (search freshmeat)
POV-Ray has a macro called blob man that builds a human figure (more like a cartoon IMHO) out of blobs (also known as metaballs)
there is also 3dsmax with character studio, maya
and hash's animation master (which is regarded as one of the best programs for character animation under $5k www.hash.com )
not sure if hash has support for motion capture data files, but I am sure the other highend programs like 3dsmax+character studio or maya have that kind of thing
and what was that thing about poser using viewpoint datalabs? I thought all the models were done by zygote? (oh btw if you check the viewpoint site there is a place where you can buy models they made for use with 3dsmax)
Check out Xara at www.xara.com
Xara is vector illustration program which has many web-enabled features.
It's a SPEED demon, thus making it a joy to use.
It was so ahead of its time that the latest version of CorelDraw stole many of the features found in Xara (but Xara is inexpensive and very stable).
No, you're not the only one seeing this. Linux on the desktop in some shape, form or fashion is inevitable. Corel is the best positioned to take advantage of it (IMHO). Damn straight I'm buying some more.
Whoops... brain fart. :P I got MetaCreations confused with someone else who is now out of business. My mistake.
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: remove whitespace to e-mail me
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Close. The issue was that you couldn't distribute any of the programs on the beta CD, which is a blatant violation of the GPL. They also linked a KDE-based program to libapt, a GPLd library. An exception was later granted for this, however. And I think the beta was fixed before the official release, so there weren't violations per se, just a lot of bad stuff that makes many people (including myself) worried about things Corel does.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
There are lots of people in this world who:
a) have a computer
b) need their hand held
The Gimp may make many things possible, but it will never prevail until it makes many things easy.
yeah, but that is why we have Windows. I don't *personally* feel that Linux needs to merge into the "typical" household. Improve on Linux and make it easier to use, but it should still require some sort of basic understanding of the system to use or we will become limited in the same ways that Windows has become limited...
"Ahhhh, and now the truth is revealed: you want Linux to remain your own little exclusionary playground, somehow thinking that by letting people like me use it, you lose something. "
actually no, I think that computers in general are my personal playground and I really don't like the fact that there are people out there that don't give a flying rats ass about how they work. Computers were not put on this earth to play games, get a Nintendo...
As far as not wanting to share Linux... I do believe that it needs to be made easier to use to allow for a larger user base, but.. I don't like the fact that there is this large influx of new users not willing to learn *ANYTHING* about the system, then they fucking whine and bitch about how "it doesn't work". Use Windows/MacOS if you want ease of use. Don't come whining to me in #linux or on email when you can't get something to work (most likely b/c you were unwilling to read).
it is a great "My First Linux," so to speak.
This scares me. I don't personally believe that Linux is an OS that should allow for absolutely no background knowledge of the OS. There are a lot of things that a user should know. Windows (9x+) scares me. I don't like the feeling that I am not in control (The GUI is taking more control than the prompt). I am afraid of that happening w/Linux.
I used to help newbies on IRC all the time. They don't understand the concept of "real work" to get things up and running. They think everything should be point and click, and it shouldn't be. I am old school perhaps, but you should at least have some sort of conceptual model of the system (and a command line interface helps build that model).
We need to have easy to use systems, but they don't need to be in the "For Dummies" category...
"I also notice the fact that we're starting to get distribution specific tools"
yeah, my biggest complaint about that sort of thing is the fact that they don't understand the concept of kernel config. They think that it is like Windows, and you have to upgrade like once a year ("where can I get the new version of Linux (RedHat)")
I started w/Slackware and a lot of text editing. Even though we do need the simple installs (I hated having to reinstall 7x my first try to get it the way I wanted (back then PCMCIA ethernet installs were not that easy) but I feel that it is still necessary to know some of the basics (most distributions don't come w/any security enabled) so that they can learn what the hell to do when their boxen break...
I agree. When I do IRC tech support the last thing I want is some user that thinks I'm the repairman and will go and fix it for them myself. I love helping out new people whenever I can but it's more a matter of point them in the right direction and give them some tips as to what things to avoid. It's only when they're really in deep that I really take the time to hold their hand.
While I like the idea that the installs are now much simpler and cleaner I also notice the fact that we're starting to get distribution specific tools such as redhat's soundconf program which makes it so
a) the user doesn't really understand what's going on
b) the user is totally lost when they try to install a version of linux that lacks these tools
- MbM
- MbM
And what incentive does a Linux user to use another OS to run these products when it is already available on the OS (s)he is familiar with? :)
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Was that the only GPL violation in Corel Linux? If so, I think that the issue has less to do with Corel willfully disobeying the GPL and more to do with Corel blundering into the Debian-vs-KDE feud that's been raging the last year or so.
0 1 - just my two bits
How is this Linux related in the least? None of MetaCreations products run under Linux (now, at least). It seems to me that Corel is doing this to expand their core business: graphics. Having been one of the big players in the past with graphics tools, it's only natural for them to snatch up this software, now that MetaCreations has pulled it's real bonehaded move.
I don't know about painter, poser, etc. But Bryce 4.0 runs well under Linux via wine. There are some redraw problems but I think those can be fixed by switching your Xserver to 8 or 16bpp. In any event it hasn't crashed on me.
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Superstition is a word the ignorant use to describe their ignorance. -Sifu
I think you will find a elisp package in emacs that will do better automatic text generation, cause yours obviously sucks.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
:) I'm glad you like it. There are actually several references to the name, "Skeezix," such as the Gasoline Alley character, and the character from the game, "Uncle Wiggily." I first heard reference to this in a song by Tourniquet called "The Skeezix Dilemma".
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Why should "progress" be more important than the needs of people (which the GPL was intended to promote and defend)? Sometimes in order to protect the commons from being enclosed, we have to make some sacrifices. The proprietary developer has the freedom to choose from many non-GPL'd proprietary commercial libraries and link against those instead. Given the developers freedom to choose another option, it seems like a small sacrifice in terms of progress, whereas compromising Free Software causes harm to the credibility of a much larger corpus of work.
The fact that merely linking your proprietary program against a GPLed (not LGPLed) library, EVEN DYNAMICALLY, is a violation of the GPL is lame. When are people (especially RMS) going to learn that ploys like this only hold back progress?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I hope my art pad will work as well as it does on my Mac with Painter. I hope there will be a Linux/PPC version.
I visited the Pinter news group. they are all freaked about Corel buying Painter. Most of them are total win weenies, and don't have what it takes to learn Linux.
I like the idea of Corel buying Painter better than Adobe.
photosMy Photostream
This is Linux related because Corel has been so focused on Linux of late. I think it is entirely reasonable to expect that they would come out with a port of these applciations to Linux. They have a heavy interest in making Linux as strong a platform as possible, since that will expand the user base of their products. And if they expand their Linux products at the same time, they have a very good shot at being one of the dominant players on this platform they are helping to grow.
Yes, it it very Linux related.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
Your argument assumes that people who detest forking are in favour of forcibly preventing forking. Forking involves duplication of effort, but there are circumstances where it's The Right Thing to do. E.g. where a maintainer is not responsive to developer/user needs or is not responsive to a minority's needs.
Let's use an analogy here:
"Funny how people detest piracy, yet will complain out loud about the Digital Milennium Copyright Act"
Does it seem so cut-and-dried now?
Finally, it is true that some people detest forking of code, and it is true that some people complain out loud if a licese prevents forking. But how do you know that some of the people who destest forking of code complain out loud if a license prevents forking?
Well the NASDAQ got nailed today, down over 5%... while Corel was down 3%, so I would say they held up pretty well today.
Most of the beating Corel has been taking lately has been due to the attempt to purchase Inprise which is not going ower too well with the Inprise shareholders. Then you add in the "insider trading" charges that Cowpland is facing and the general bloodletting that the nasdaq is going through and you can see many reasons for the downward slide. Not to mention they missed their earings mark fairly badly a few weeks ago.
I'll agree that they are probably undervalued at 10 bucks per share but these are strange days for the market and it's hard to say where this company is going.
The GIMP, when it comes to color pre-press work, isn't on par with Photoshop as one cannot (iirc, I haven't kept up with GIMP for a few months) tweak inking settings, set-up duotones, etc. --- these are very important features and, agreeably, it needs to be addressed in the Gimp.
My wife does a lot of color correcting for a custom printing setup at her work (Mac, Photoshop, and some really awesome Canon color copiers/printers), and she states that the GIMP is definitely not in the same league as Photoshop is in that particular area.
However, that may primarily be because the GIMP works internally on an RGB color model and has limited support for everything else. Part of the hassle, however, are the color patents (Pan-Tone leaps to mind immediately), which means that setting up a "guaranteed" result via one of the standard color palettes is simply not possible in the GIMP.
On the other hand, as she has explored the GIMP at home, she has commented that there are several areas where the GIMP shines relative to Photoshop -- tear-off menus, remappable keys, the plethora of plug-ins, customizability (I've started hacking the plug-ins at her request, actually). So, she's been doing her personal compositions, experiments, and real work in the GIMP at home, and then taking it in to work as a TIFF and color correcting it there, as needed.
If we had a good (and stable) printer setup at home (chintzy ink jet for now), she could learn the specifics of that printer and adjust for it using the GIMP. On the other hand, she couldn't map it to Pan-Tone and pass it off to a print shop and be able to expect the results to be what she wants.
She describes the differences now as being "Photoshop for presswork, GIMP for usability". Wow. Quite a turnaround from the first time she used it (0.99 series). We're running the latest developers (non-CVS) release -- 1.1.19.
This
Pity you can't indipendently set the horizontal and vertical DPI. This would be useful with the resolutions where a pixel is not a square.
I can't do nothing but hope this is the good time. Although commercial multi-toolkit, multi-platform GUI frameworks have been existing for a long time, either they die out after few years, or offer the common denominator of all the platforms/toolkits they support (which usually is bare bone).
WxWindows may be the right tool at the right time doing the right job, and the fact it's free (as in speak) means it'll probably last longer than any closed-source GUI framework.
Here
While the Kai's Power Tools "interface" generally bugs me, I rather like the Bryce interface. I suppose that any "artistic" interface will be hit-or-miss-horribly...
Also, better to run it at all than to see the products vanish, given that Metatools is dropping support for it's non-3d-e-commerce thingy.
Yes, but you go ahead and type something that long into a tiny box(i think you can make in larger, dunno exactly). He obviously wrote it in say Wordperfect and copied it over.
They're still words!
-niteq
As I understand it, Goo or Soap are NOT part of this particular deal. Read carefully -- neither is mentioned in this article. Why? Because Goo and Soap are owned by ScanSoft, a company that has quietly been acquiring quite a number of products. Will they pay any attention to the Linux market? I doubt it. They're more likely to pay attention to how their products can be used over the Web.
I was wrong - you are right, Zygote did the models (my bad)...
NURBS seem like the next best way to go (blobs/metaballs are definitely out, unless that is the look you are going for), but you still have to "roll your own" model (I am not a graphics artist, I am a programmer - modeling is not my forte) or purchase one if you want something that looks like a real person.
This is the main problem - cost. It costs a lot for good models (not that you shouldn't have to pay for them), but it was nice that Metacreations licensed the models to use in a low cost program (Poser) for others to use (though you can't use the actual model data in your own code). For an open source solution, it is near to impossible to license that model data, because of the high cost.
The solution is to get a low cost (or free) dataset of a human model, that could be used by the rendering programs that are available to the OS community. That, or some company could license an expensive model, then allow others to use (sub-license) it for small fee (hey, that would be an interesting open source project - the software human form modeler, with a low-res dataset for development work, could be distributed as normal open source. If you liked the software, and wanted to seriously use it, you would then charge (say $200) for a license for the complete hi-res dataset - OS the code, but license the data under a more restrictive agreement).
I know that serious modelers and developers probably don't care about model cost - but single developers, and ordinary people who just want to play - do. Human form modeling software is a niche market, but there is a market for a $200-400 modeler that does this one thing well...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This is probably the one product the Metacreations has that is not found on the Linux platform - and is one I would love to see there. Does anyone know of an open source project to perform human figure modelling under Linux (or any other platform)?
One BIG barrier to entry for OS projects in this arena is obtaining the data - Poser uses models from Viewpoint Datalabs, and let me tell you, these models don't come cheap (esp. the human figure model data - this is real expensive). So unless the OS community comes up with a way to get this data themselves (rent a 3D scanner? Use this?), I think Poser will be the only hope (though not the hope I was hoping for)...
Any ideas?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Yeah, and you'll be the ONLY one of the first group of people who pays for these softwares. These Linux hackers not only don't understand any software that isn't free to begin with, but they likely are the same guys who warezed all the expensive Adobe software when they were Windows users. The main people who pay for that stuff is corporate users and I find it very unlikely that any serious company will be using Linux on their workstations unless they have a very large pool of talent to draw from, where they can afford to be so choosy as to say "Candidates must be familiar with Linux environment rather than Windows".
I hereby declare that ANY company that tries to make money selling software for the Linux platform will go under very swiftly, unless they have a backup plan to circumvent mass pirating of their software among these users. Mark my words. Windows may have a lot of "dumb" users but those "dumb" users have the money. I don't know many back-room open source hackers who have lots of cash on hand...
So you have a conceptual model of how your auto works, having tinkered around building cars, an idea or two about how your television works, having worked at a manufacturing plant in Taiwan, you pretty much are an expert at how your oven works when you cook, having picked up a MS in food science, and you're have a firm underpinning of how the lights in your house come on when you flip the switch, having spent some time as a journeyman electrician? I'm impressed, my man, rather impressed!
That actually sounds like a sound interpretation of Corel's stock problem.
I never really paid any attention to Cowpland, because he's never said anything interesting. Corel seems like a decent enough company, and they've been around since forever (not as long as Apple or Microsoft, but anything over ten years is "forever" in the computer business).
Imagine if IBM bought Corel. That would be really cool. IBM has a very pro-Linux agenda right now, they have good management, a well-known and respected CEO, and loads of resources to dedicate to any good projects that Corel has going (WINE, Corel Linux, Wordperfect Office, etc).
Another decent candidate to buy Corel would be SGI. They don't have the resources or market valuation of IBM (nor a famous CEO, though they used to, until he got bored), but SGI seems to have something of a vision and market respectability.
I can't really think of too many other people that would want or even really care about a has-been, also-ran Microsoft competitor.
Though, I used to think the same about Borland...
Why was this moderated a insightful?
Metacreations makes some nice products, but to tell the truth their UIs are fairly retarded. Nontheless, I feel this is good for Linux. Assuming these are ported, it makes Linux viable as a graphics tool. (Kinda like SGI, though BeOS already has the "poor man's SGI" moniker.) Some of these apps may go over well, but I doubt stuff like Bryce (does it use 3D hardware yet?) or other 3D apps will go over too well on Linux. In that arena, NT still has the lead in terms of hardware acceleration. Sure linux has DRI, but it is relatvily unsupported (I don't consider the Voodoo3 to be a graphics person's 3D card. 16bit color c'mon! That's so passe!) Linux is aiming at the workstation market in terms of desktop (at least thus far, IMNSHO it is still not ready for the corporate desktop and definatly not for the home user) Thus it has to support workstation level 3D cards. There is one ray of hope, however. Though it pains OSS zealots everywhere, these kind of apps in conjuction with nVidia's propriotory, binary-only 3D drivers for it's Quadro card (GeForce and Quadro are very similar, so if GeForce drivers come out, Quadro should too.) will catapault Linux to a major hold on the workstation market.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thanks for the information, but its a little too late for my University. Corel 8 was removed from all 5,000 faculty/staff desktop machines and replaced with either Word 2k/97. the software people have made a deal to not sell WP for an extended period of time (3-4 years) on new machines as well.
When they had great problems with Corel, of course we did install all service packs and the MS library update. C'mon, that's just common sense.
Corel tries hard, because Linux is their last foothold. Have you ever used Corel WP 8? It is really terrible. The University where I work, for some time supported both Office and WordPerfect, but WordPerfect just crashes too often and is a pain for all those involved.
In my own experience WP8 for linux crashes as well. I thought I was the only one who has experienced this, but a friend of mine who is new to linux complained the other day about how frightened he was while using it, that it would crash and lose his document again
In conclusion, If you are a proprietary company and your main product really sucks and is getting its ass kicked by the competitor, why not give it away for free? Revenue may be lower, but name recognition may increase.
Before seeing it on my computer my girlfriend had never heard of WordPerfect, I've used it since wp3 or wp4 on my Mom's 286? maybe 386?. This is what Corel is battling. If they didn't make this radical ( read desperate ) move... they would be sinking even faster than they currently are.
Sorry, I'm not moving to Linux for graphics apps for some time. Until Linux has a consistent system wide OS appearence for all software apps,
Sorry to be critical, but are you joking? Linux will never have a consistent sytstem wide OS appearance for all software apps. Never! And the reason is simple, there are already many style guides for different GUI toolkits, but because we ( read you, me, hemos, etc) write the apps we have the freedom to ignore the style guides and we do. Check out freshmeat, even though there are only a few GUI toolkits, most apps look very different. The only way I forsee you ever possibly reaching this goal is with the desktop environment people. If you use all kde stuff it looks pretty similiar, but if I write something in QT without an edit menu will that drive you crazy?
Choice baby, that's what it's all about.
Does there Linux run on PPC or x86 only?
Nope, it is x86 specific.
Does anyone else find the body of that message, in conjunction with the sig, very very funny? Mod up!
matt
My apologies, posted to the wrong forum
Hey, I admitted I could easily be wrong on the postscript. and the dpi beating was deserved, but maybe a bit mean. :) (I'm replying to 3 posts here, not just yours).
as for native file formats (like postscript), you've got a point - postscript is a standard and standards are best. but i also remember the days when coreldraw (5-6) would output postscript that no service bureau could accept. and postscript is only as good as the software/driver maker is. why can't i print to epson printers on the mac InDesign, but I can on windows for example.
for better or worse, the de facto "standards" in the content arena are proprietary software: photoshop, premiere, director, xpress, freehand/illustrator, etc.
i know this goes beyond the linux thing, but when can i get a file format like photoshop format that saves layers, has editable text, text effects, and adjustment layers? and how rapidly will it be adopted? PNG is an open format and years later we have virtually no software that can display them properly. i'm a cynic and want to support open standards, but give me some options here for daily work.
in any event, i'm glad i am wrong about some things. but i still think linux itself, (and corel's new buys in particular if they port these to linux) has a long way to go before designers use linux daily. designers want the computer out of the way even more than the general consumer and i just see it being a while before linux can offer me as a designer the conveinence and abilities of a mac or even pc.
i do hope those apps get ported to linux and take off.
It seems the remaining issues you've brought up have been addressed elsewhere below apart from
Why excactly do you see Corel unable to compete against it? They have a vector based drawing tool, an office suite, an OS [hello, lets build a visio competitor], two photo maqnipulation suites, a 3D landscape generator, a poser to match the 3D landscape generator, a layout engine, a database. Alot of the products are viewed as leaders in their market - eg, CorelDraw, Paradox, or Bryce.
Have you actually seen the `show as you go' feature in Corels Office suite? This is a massive boost to Office productivity. Eg, making a chart for a spreadsheet. Excel - click cells you want to chart. Click the chart tool. Answer perhaps eight or so questions and you have a chart. Quattro Pro - click the ceels, click the chart tool. The chart appears, based on intelligent analysis of your data. Want to change it? Click the chart type button which drops down instantly. As you drag the mouse over the different chart types, the chart updates every time you hover the mouse over a new chart type. It is UNBELIEVABLY fast.
The same thing occurs zooming out to view the entire document. Modify a heading - click the type button, and as you drag the mouse over the different options, the entire document updates in realtime.
Using Corel Office 2K with the service pack [like MS, the inital release was admittedly flaky] actually lives up to the expectation thaty software should increase in speed when your box does. Is Word 2000 any faster than Word 6 doing the same thing? Corel is.
Corel Office can generate PDF by clicking `save to PDF'. With MS, you can pay $AU 399 for Acrobat 4.
It's not all roses. Corels contact manager simply isn't as good as Outlook, and in fact bites like a pirhana. The Windows Corel Office 2K also sticks alot of crap in your system tray. But is certainly the most innovative Office suite on the market today in terms on the WordProcessor and Spreadsheet.
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The other matter which has gone unaddressed are color correction issues, pantone, colorsmart, and other color correction technologies are patentended by Adobe, Apple, Koday and others and unlikely to be released as open source any time soon. However, there is absolutely nothing stopping a binary only release of these features as an XFree86 4 module, which can be closed source.
Mike
....that Corel managed to lose all their
programmers and turned into annoying crowd of
suits and marketoids.
And this becomes a really worrying tendence.
KuroiNeko
While you guys are discussing media on linux, I have a question. What are the prospects of doing high end graphics and video on Be. It seems to be the perfect platform for it, and since it is only one distribution it would be a lot easier to develope (i would think).
The way it handles data I would think is much better for media than windows could ever be.
Any thoughts?
"The gimp has it's own internal format for gimp use if that's what you mean. I don't see the use in having another thing that a browser can't read
and needs me to start up a very, very large memory hog (I had to increase my swap size just for gimp use). "
Ahh but obviously the gimp needs its internal format. It needs to store things like layers that have no effect in a browser but are vital to the program itself. There's much more information stored in a psd file (for photoshop) than just the bitmap.
72 dpi is even more historical than that. There have been 72 points in an inch since God knows when. The Mac's display was originally designed around that, so that one pixel == one point.
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The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
I use Corel products at home and at work, and I am constantly impressed by their quality. Within the last year or so, they've been putting out their own linux port and aggresively picking up other software packages. It brings one question to my mind: is Corel becoming the new Microsoft? I don't know if it'd be good or bad, but it really seems this way to me. As long as they're using their power simply to bring linux to a new level of acceptance that's great, but after seeing what Microsoft has done to abuse its power it makes me wonder what Corel really has up their sleeve in all of this.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
My graphics experience is a couple of years old. (I'm no longer a GA). I was talking Corel 7 days. I know we had a manager who did some stuff in corel ('cause he was a PC dude and that was what PC dudes used, because God forbid he used the best tool for the job, a mac). Anyway, we had HELL getting that stuff out. Went to four different service bureaus and paid a fortune before it was all said and done. Yes, I have used Corel. It's not bad software at all, but It's PS output was shit. Maybe it's better in 9, but I just called a service bureau here and they STILL charge more to output a Corel file than a PageMaker or Quark file.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I call computer. Sorry. Better luck in the next Turing competition!
Who actually likes Corel Draw Suite (photopaint in particular)? I actually prefer it over Adobe.
If you recall Corel's initial "beta" release of their distro, they had a "closed" beta where only select people got source code. A lot of people on Slashdot complained about this if I recall. I don't know if this was the state of it through the entire beta period, but I think that this made Corel look pretty bad in the eyes of many Open Source advocates.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Shit, that's what I thought when I bought my RedHat at 110... (down to 35 or so)
- passion
I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but what incentive does anyone have to use Linux if the same applications are already available on the OS they are familiar with? Dad isn't going to start using Mandrake just because Quicken and his favorite golf game was ported to X11. Besides, X fonts really suck, and Motif apps like Netscape make me wanna puke.
I started tinkering with Linux because there was all kinds of fun stuff I could legitimately make (full) use of for free, like the GIMP and PHP...
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E2 IN2 IE?
From what I heard about Photoshop for Unix from our chief graphics designer,
it sucked anyway compared to both Mac and Windows versions of that time.
i think the title says it all...
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
Thanks for playin....
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Yes, and people shouldn't be allowed to drive cars unless they can rebuild a slip differential, or at least explain the design principles of a four stroke internal combustion engine. ;-p
There is certainly a place for deep-wizardry versions of Linux (like servers and render farms), but there is also a place for appliance-style versions (like an office desktop that's trying to escape M$).
... that needs answering: What is the status of Bryce on BeOS? Last I heard, it was put on hold because of Metacreation's focus shift (hmm, Be focus shifts, metacreations focus shifts, just coincidence?). I hope that Corel doesn't kill the port because they want to be "just Linux" - BeOS is a good OS for media, and if Corel wants any hint of world domination (esp. now that they dropped the MacOS), they need BeOS.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
Unbelievably fast? I beta tested Corel Office 2000 for Linux, and running it under wine is _anything_ but fast. Try Gobe Productive - it does what you say, better.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
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All of corel's existing ports run under wine. Beta testing Word Perfect Office 2000 for Linux was enough to make me buy a copy of Gobe Productive for BeOS - they were that slow. I couldn't use it for more than a half-hour at a time - it would just drive me insane. And no, I wasn't running it on a 486 - my computer is a dual PII 400. Let's just hope they don't kill Bryce for BeOS.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
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I believe the "issue" was about their package installer/updater using libapt, which is GPL, but also used QT. In the end, the apt maintainer granted an license exception to Corel for this program. My memory's kind of muddy on the details though, so don't flame me if i got something wrong :)
I doubt you'll be seing any Gimp plug-ins from Corel. Last time I checked their Linux Distribution they didn't have the development packages for either Gimp or GTK.
How wonderfully random. Thanks for the laugh! (The misposting not AskANigger.com)
You must not forget, though, that what a Mac user sees as inferior is not only the Windows software platform, but also the clunky hardware that is in a PC. I have plenty of machines, ranging from Apple through Sun to SGI, the machines I am least affected to are my Intel boxes, even though generally they are faster at a lot of things I do. I think the non-(w|l)intel boxen radiate a spiritual sense of holeness that PCs, due to their cost-effectiveness fetish, will never reach.
Now the big question is going to be, are Corel only going to release Linux/x86 binaries, or are they going to actually really use the power of the "fragmented" UN*X market and port over with ease to related systems like Solaris and IRIX and to other hardware platforms like Alpha and PowerPC?
Pi
Unlike Corel which sells proprietary software that isn't free (freedom), Reh Hat takes an active role in developing free (freedom) software that makes Linux better for ALL the community. Corel is no better that Microsoft. If it can make the wordPerfect proprietary file format uniquitous on Linux, they will. As a matter of fact it's their plan exactly. Corel is a conveniance vendor. For the permission to install and use their products, you have to give away some of your freedom. By using their file formats, you are blocking non-Corel product owners out of the information you saved in it.
Geez. I only started using Linux when Red Het 5.1 came out and I already feel like one of those bearded free software advocates when I compare myself to the average slashdotter these days. I remember a time when threads here were about a mouvement of hackers that stood for something that has a higher meaning than conveniance, market share and stock value.
Where have all the philosophers gone? Have we let ourselves be pushed out of our place of gathering by the exact mentality from which we soth refuge?
(not meant as a flame to the above poster)
Until Linux has a consistent system wide OS appearence for all software apps .......... I doubt you'll see Linux in the hands of graphic designers/artists anytime soon.
Well if people are so stupid to want every program forced into the same mould irrespective of its intended use, I for one will be glad if they stay off Linux.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
...sometimes doesn't give the words you want.
In fact, the largest single cause of WP 7 and 8 crashes are defective DLL run times released by Microsoft with Visual Studio 6.0 and installed by some 50 Microsoft applications that were programmed using it. Applying the Microsoft Foundation Classes Library Update, that MSFT finally issued months after WP had its reputation smeared by Microsoft's Breakware DLLs, will take care of those problems.
If you'd like to do something about the problems, record the details of your error messages and triggering events, and post them to a forum that deals with WP issues like http://www.wpwin.com/talk
Corel engineers are less forthcoming now, but in the early days of their involvement with the Wine Project, they openly discussed plans and their work to port Wine itself to various platforms including the PPC and StrongARM processors, to port all their apps to Wine, and then from there to compile them using Wine lib-c to run natively on the various platforms.
Since then, Corel has produced Mac PPC ports of some of their retail graphics apps, which I've assumed indicates the stage of their development of the Wine-Mac PPC port. There was a Corel press statement accompanying its decision to make Mac WordPerfect 3.5 available as a free download that was widely interpreted by the press as meaning that Corel would have no further WordPerfect releases. However, the actual language Corel used could as easily support the opposite conclusion. http://www.corel.com/news/1999/august/august_19_1
I've misplaced the link, but one of the Mac community online publications claimed several months ago to have hard insider information that Corel has a new Mac version of WordPerfect in development.
Corel also released a press release a few months ago announcing a planned joint gift to charities with Rebel.com of a large number of Netwinders and WP Office 2000. With the Netwinder running on the StrongARM processor and Corel's ownership stake in Rebel.com, one might suspect that the planned gift of WP Office 2000 was intended to run on the machines rather than just sit in desk drawers, e.g., run on the StrongARM. There is also the factor that Corel kept about 50 members of the Netwinder development team when it sold the Netwinder to Rebel.com. They were assigned to the Corel Linux development team, which puts a lot of Linux StrongARM engineers under one roof.
Just before AMIGA blew up last year, Corel and Amiga announced a deal for Corel to adapt WP Office 2000 for a Linux distro AMIGA had under development. AMIGA was widely believed at the time to be developing for a Transmeta processor, so that suggests that Corel at least had the Transmeta processor line in its development path.
Corel's press release on the MetaCreations deal yesterday reinforced the perception of events such as those discussed above:
http://www.corel.com/news/2000/april/april_10_200
So as I said initially, lots of hints, bits, and pieces. But considering Corel's commitment to cross-platform development with Wine as the crossroads, it's almost foregone that Corel will port all of its apps to whatever platform it releases any of its major apps on.
If anything, I think it will do some good, and make things more compatable. Becasue, as a corel user, i can tell you that not many of the plugins work in photopaint, even though they're spossed to.
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And I don't think that Corel will let the products fall to peices.
I think they will work at improving it just as much as there own software.
Corel have quite oftern had Kia plug-ins (demo version) bundeled with PhotoPaint.
But since Adobe PhotoShop Has such a larger market share. PhotoPaint has been left out in the cold a bit when it comes to plug-ins. Now that they have MetaCreatons, I think you will start to see a big differnce with app's like PhotoPaint.
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Goto there site (www.corel.com), dig around in there press releases, news, etc.. and i think you will find that they will be supporting Flash at least.
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Now corel, do me one favor, offer up some Macromedia Shockwave compatability, and we're in business!
tcd004
Corel keeps on buying and trying. MS has tried one to many times to screw them over and I think this is corels way of saying "ohh that's okay" then sucker punching them in the side. All these windows tools that corel keeps buying is going to make a truly awesome linux distribution. They know that a product is a good product hence why they bought it. And they know people will want it. I dunno about you, but gimp is a great program, but when you can use a program as easy as Goo or Photo Soap to do a lil image sprucing up ... why wouldn't you? Okay everyone says corel isn't for the "real" or "power" linux user, but what exactly is a real or power linux user. I mean if you use redhat or suse (or any other packaged distro) are you losing the effect of installing libraries and compiling your own binaries? Corel makes products that are useful and easy to use. They want to make it so you don't have to take a class to use their products ... where you can just ask a friend for some help on how to do something. And the help files they provide could make anyone happy. I like corel. I like corel linux. And theres nothing my Corel box can't do that your Slackware box can't do.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
For commercial vendors (ie E-commerce sites), they plan on charging a negotiable amount per "model-view"
I wonder if I'm the only person who gets nostalgic for the old days when you could buy (actually license) some software and use it as much as you want.
I think Corel's stock is going down for a long time... It will cost them a lot of money for Painter and Bryce. Do you remember the buy of Wordperfect ?
I see no profits for a long time. More dramatic, I see no release of CorelDraw 10 for mac and Win32. I think corel isnt doing the right thing by investing too much on linux. They r forgetting the win32 and mac consumers who have more money to spend then a 18 years old student on linux.
Really, I think that selling corel now is a good thing. For myself, I will reinvest when I will see a new version of Corel Draw on the table.
Thanx
Dude
Corel *does* have a linux distro. Where have you been for the past few months?
Your post made no sense. Go back to 3rd grade and learn how to write things that people are able to understand.
I think one reason that Corel is moving away from Microsoft dependant products is because Word Perfect was so hard to develop on Windows in the first place. Not that C syntax changes extreme amounts from one OS to another, its because of Microsoft's monopolstic practices. Why go though all the struggle of developing on a platform thats so elitest?
Anyway, I think its a wonderful thing that Corel is giving Linux so much attention. I know that seeing a big company like that putting their time and effort into an upstart FREE OS like Linux makes them want to invest in Redhat, VA linux, etc. If I were an investor and didn't know computers very well, it would make me want to invest.
What About apps like Photoshop?
They are in direct competition with Corels suite of graphic/illustration products. I know currently Photoshop filters are compatible with PhotoPaint....but now that Corel owns Meta Creations.... is this going to change?
thanks
djsw
Does this mean I'll have Painter running on my Linux box and Kai's Power Tools plugins for the Gimp soon?
Hopefully not. Especially after today's story about GUI standards. Metatools is absolutely the worst for this stuff
A few years ago I was looking at the web page of a company that made a collection of fancy plug-ins for Photoshop. These were the Alien Skin plug-ins or somesuch. They had a bunch of useful snazzy special effects, and most of them could be accomplished by combining the functions of several of the then-existing GIMP plug-ins.
So I was looking at their examples, and I was saying to myself, "got it", "got it", "got it", "umm, could do it with a little hacking". I came to a very pretty effect that made an image look like if it were woven with thick ribbons. So I got off my butt and wrote the Weave script for Script-fu. I was very proud. I was also very happy that complicated effects could be whipped up quickly with a little Scheme script.
The Alien Skin plug-ins were proprietary and quite expensive; this 300-line Scheme script is free software and gratis. The Alien Skin stuff still has a prettier user interface, and Script-fu does not provide facilities for real user interfaces, but the point is that the same effect could be pulled off with the existing GIMP tools and a bit of hacking.
Metacreations' KPT plug-ins are mostly of the same kind; no wizardry involved, just a very flashy user interface. I haven't missed them with all the stuff the GIMP can do.
Still, Metacreations has some really incredible stuff that will take some heavy wizardry to duplicate as free software, in particular their 3D mesh decimation and compression stuff. It is awesome. Hopefully some highly clueful hackers and 3D junkies will write free software that does an equivalent thing.
Free software can make a big difference. I hope developers are not put off by companies releasing proprietary software for free systems. We win nothing with that kind of software. It has to be freed or replaced with something free.
Anyone think a move like this might help get the Adobe's and Macromedia's of the world motivated to release Linux ports? Just asking...
Metacreations is entering a very competitive, but under utilised, area. There are lots of applications of good, fast, interactive 3d models for the web. Have you heard of Cult3D by Cycore?? Lets you play with an interactive Palm VII, Nokia Communicator with sms from the model and heaps more.
I've been using VRML in the past but it is far less suitable for these applications.
Metacreations one is good too but they don't have the customer base of the Cult3d yet, but if they continue with their usual excellence of software and innovative gui's then we should see something great soon.
The customer, (the main reason for 3D), likes the neat tricks and gee whiz of these models and that's what sells the products.
Excellent point that it shouldn't be their whole business.
Having TAO as their base OS/GUI extension would make it more feasible porting the Metacreation tools to more than just Linux...
Hey, maybe that was their plan all along...
Oh and before you flame me... Somebody was bound to mention the Amiga again... sorry ;)
Ah but you miss the point. If it works good then there is no need to complain to anybody at all. Less trouble all around.
Linux is not for the computer illiterate user but, unfortunatly, some hype makes it sound simplier than it is. Thats where the problem is lies.
I would think the next generation of installers for linux probably will be quite easy to use and cut back on much of the current problems.
While it would be nice if everybody had some understanding of the OS they use it just simply is
not a reality. Ask anyone who has done help desk support, most users are fairly clueless. Let's face it most users don't need to know they just need to be able to get thier work done.
Requiring real knowledge of the OS is just a barrier to real wide spread use. The whole reason the web has taken off is because it became so easy to use (point and click). The average consumer does not want to have to think about how his PC works, he just wants it to do what he tells it with no problems.
I know several smart professionals, a couple in Finance, another a professor in Poly Sci, and one with a Ph.d in Computer Science, who simply don't want to bother with a command prompt, or troff formatting macros, or even with learning to configure Windows. They're very busy, their minds are worked to the limit with their jobs, and they don't need the hassle of learning how a computer works. They can't change their oil, either.
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I18N == Intergalacticization
this does not corrupt this company's reputation. Corel's acquisition of Inprise has tainted Inprise and its products.
Let's hope they open source the Linux side of things.
"E-commerce visualization" - just what the world really needs. No, they stopped making actual products and started selling "e"-hype instead. The only thing they're missing now is an "@" in their name.
This is really exciting. Although I dont personally use any of there software, I really enjoy seeing software companies port to Linux.
Porting to different platforms other than windows is a huge step- it gives the end user a choice in an operating system, not being forced to use an OS that they hate, only because a certain OS has all the software support.
I see alot of people saying things like, "All they need to do is port xxxxx to Linux and I can delete windows!" I think this is sad, because this person is being forced to buy an operating system he doesn't even use, except when he needs to use a certain program.
I will always be happy when software companies port to other OS's - Even if it is Office 2000
--Brandon
"wasssaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaappppp"
I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but Corel has to make some cash somehow: I'm wondering how strong the commitment to OpenSource is. Is anyone else worried that future versions of Corel-owned Linux software are going to be closed? I wouldn't be too terribly surprised.
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
I agree with you... my statements were made with the mistaken idea that MetaCreations was something other than it was -- mistaken identity. I had thought Corel had started buying up rights to OpenSource software.
Just because it is likely that they will be selling software doesn't automatically make them into the Evil Empire.
I think you read too much into my comments. My concern isn't over closed-source software -- I currently develop a package that we keep closed because it generates more revenue. My concern was that previously open projects would be closed, causing a code fork (an open tree and a closed tree) and confusion for new users. I think we can all agree that, in general, that would be a bad thing.
And the GPL/LGPL stops Corel from closing their sources on code that adds onto existing GPL/LGPL code bases so don't panic.
This may be true, but if Corel owns the copyright, they can release all future versions under a closed license. It doesn't stop someone from forking off an open edition of the same software, but as discussed above, it causes confusion -- if Linux is to be a force on the home desktop, we need to work on eliminating (rather than creating) confusion.
Of course, this whole thing is my fault: I misread MetaCreations as something else entirely. Sorry 'bout that :P
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Corel Office 2000 uses the exact same binary as the windows version (in fact, it runs under Wine -- Corel have set forth some decent smelling reasons they do it this way). I believe that their proprietary version of wine is setup to support a KDE look & feel, but I also think this can be turned off.
I wonder how long it's going to be before the increasing cluelessness of the moderators destroy's slashdot? This post should never have gotten a +5.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
So if CORL was down today, don't take it personally. It was a bad day.
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wtf?
The primary use of my computer is extremely specific: I use it for creating paper-based documents -- work activity flowcharts, SOPs, training manuals, etcetera.
Why the hell would you have me waste my time, worth anywhere between $40 and $100 an hour depending on the job, pissing about with wrangling with command lines, control files and other crap?
Using the computer isn't a hobby for me. It's my employment. I'm either productive and getting paid, or unproductive and losing money. I've got real work to do, and hacking X's initialization file reduces my productivity.
Make Linux easier to use, and if it benefits my bottom line, I'll use it. Insist on my spending weeks learning esoteric shit, and I won't.
Ahhhh, and now the truth is revealed: you want Linux to remain your own little exclusionary playground, somehow thinking that by letting people like me use it, you lose something.
Shame. That sort of thinking is utterly foolish. Linux isn't like an apple pie: there isn't a limit to how much it can be shared. My having a piece doesn't make your piece smaller.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Most of these complaints are valid, though I'm not so sure about the postscript one. However, 72 dpi screen resolution is a historical anomaly. A modern monitor with .25mm to .28mm dot pitch is showing between 90.7 and 101.6 dots per inch. Forcing one's monitor to display at 72 dpi means using dots which are 0.35mm across, which looks pretty ugly once the anti-aliasing happens, unless your monitor's dot-pitch is 0.35mm (or 0.175mm). 72 dpi is a leftover from the Mac which displays text at one pixel per point so that 12 point type is 12 pixels high. However, this will not necessarily display the correct size on any monitor.
Besides, X can be configured to believe that 72 dots is one inch, though it is not easy, and the instructions are buried in the documentation.
On the cover of the April issue of MacAddict:
:)
PLUS: MetaCreations ditches its entire product line!
I thought it was an April Fools' joke. It really looked like one.
How many people remember that Corel Draw 6 included "Corel Dream 3D", aka Ray Dream 3D?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I wonder if I'm the only person who gets nostalgic for the old days when you could buy (actually license) some software and use it as much as you want.
Actually, I'm nostalgic for the old days when you didn't have to buy it - you just mailed a blank tape to the guys at Cambridge and they'd send it back with such cool things as Gosper's new version of LIFE, new gravity modes for Spacewar, and some cool editor macros for TECO! (After all, who needs dem newfangled ARPANET nonsense, right?)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I wonder if anyone in the market is as smart as they seem to think they are.
MS gets slammed by Judge Jackson, suddenly everyone's stock drops. Why? Ya got me. MS is one company. We all know the evil that is Microsoft, but shouldn't them getting hurt help Inprise, Corel, Real, etc? Suddenly the market for competing products starts to look a little more rosey, yet the opposite happens. Everyone drops.
Heck, I consider myself a Power User like the next guy, but typing damn smbmount commands everytime I want to connect to a measly share is quite a pain. I did give Corel's distro a good try, and although I didn't like the fact that it "hides" a lot of technical info, it's a pleasure to use.
Being a Power User also means that you have plenty of non-compiling-related work done, and you don't want to waste that time entering million-character commands that you already know well. Just the fact that a person is using Corel Linux instead of Windows 98 already proves that that person is different and bold, even if Corel Linux is "The Linux for the folks".
I use it. And I grew up on Slackware. To each his own.
This is corny, but at Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 road show, I learned that Corel stands for
COwpland REsearch Labs...
Cool huh?
... and I also bought a copy of WP Office 2000. Don't warez Linux software. Buy it. It's supporting the community!
The reason a stock goes down after an announcement like this is simple: dividends. While the media would have most people believing that the reason to buy a stock is because it will appreciate in value, this is misleading; the reason a stock appreciates in value is that its profit margin, which stockholders each get a proportional piece of, goes up. When you announce you're going to be spending a nice chunk of change on something, whether its a good idea or a bad one, it means that the profits will go down for a quarter or two, and there's no dividends to be had. Thus, financial managers (ie mutual fund managers etc) sell the stock off to buy something that will make some profit. Then they buy it back when its low.
If you have Corel stock, now is NOT the time to sell; hang on to it for a few years. If you have a few thousand laying around in a CD somewhere ready to mature, I would put it in something like this. In a few years, Corel at 10 is going to be a pleasant memory.
AS ALWAYS, these opinions are my own. I rarely successfully balance my checkbook, so take financial advice from me with a grain of salt.
You have a lot of good points, especially about preserving existing peripheral investments.
I don't think the path the success starts with sweeping away all legacy systems, however.
The key is to do something useful. The graphic arts market is important because they are very accustomed to paying good money for useful things. I'm not a graphic artist myself, but I know a number of them and they have expressed a great deal of interest in Linux because of web serving. Web design is beginning to turn artists into hackers.
I see the path to success in this market as this: first get Linux into the shops because it does something better/faster/cheaper. I think web service is Unix's killer app. Begin to provide more and better tools so more day to day tasks can simply be done on Linux instead of on the Mac and shipped over.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
While I'm excited at the prospect of more professional-oriented graphics software being available on the Linux platform, I can't help but think this is one weird deal. I don't ever remember hearing of a software company that basically dumped all of their current products to focus on something that is pretty much untested...
Would it be possible to write an abstraction layer above Qt/KDE and Gtk/GNOME that allowed you to replace the widget set at compile-time? If so, your installer could detect the libraries that you've got and install that version.
I know GNOME, and I know that just about everything is ultra-generic to the point that it makes sense to use XML descriptions of your user-interface and generate code in whatever language you like. We take the performance hit for internationalization. We take the performance hit for distributed objects. If we could just write an interface layer that abstracts the code the programmer has to write, then we'd be pretty much done, and I can't believe that the performance hit would compare to CORBA.
Let's see. You'd need some common way of getting at objects, but that's easy. Use CORBA, and write an ORBIt-KOM interface. Miguel was saying that this would be hard, but I think with enough programmer eyes on the task, it would be simple.
Of course, in the end this would be the death-knell of KDE. KDE relies on a widget set that's almost entirely free. GNOME relies on one that *is* free. If there's no real difference other than the licensing....
In the end, that's irrelevant. What matters is that people not feel hobbled so that they have to use extinct toolkits to write their apps (I'm sick of Netscape screwing up my theme, and I won't fall for it again).
I, as much as anyone, would LOVE a linux version of Bryce. There are a couple of problems though, Meta does NOT own Bryce, so they cannot sell it to Corel. They never bought the rights to it, only licensed it from it's creator, Eric Wenger. I read this in a post from Eric himself on the Bryce newsgroup. The only thing they own is the UI, created by Kai. Another point is the fact that they announced they were dropping it from the lineup last year. I understand that Eric is going to be working with Corel on this project though, so hopefully this will be a good thing, and Bryce will be in good hands. :)
I would post the message from Eric, but don't know if that would be a proper thing to do or not.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Screw Adobe, for not porting their SGI version to Linux.
I'm assuming you're talking about Photoshop.
There was an SGI version as you say, as well as a Sparc version.
Note I said WAS. Waaaay back in version 3.x. Adobe would sell approximately _0_ copies of photoshop if they were to port the SGI/Sparc sources now. Who wants a 4 year old image manipulator? It didn't even come with editable text, or layer effects, and undo was only one level deep.
The Gimp is years ahead of this. Unfortunately, we're still playing catchup with Photoshop 5.x.
If Adobe would port Photoshop NOW -- the new version from the win32/mac sources, we'd be talking.
Dividends do not drive stock price. Neither Cisco nor Microsoft, the two highest valued companies with a combined market cap of almost a trillion dollars, pay dividends. Companies which don't pay dividends have more money to invest in growth, which usually helps their stock price. You're not going to get rich off of dividends, you'd make more money by putting your money in a savings account.
As an ex-digital designer and now a 100% linux user, this is the big news that we have been waiting for too damn long. Screw Adobe, for not porting their SGI version to Linux.
I swear I'll be one of the first group of people who pays for these softwares. The Microsoft era, the dark age of computer science, is now finally coming to an end.
Actually I did write it in the tiny box. But I don't consider this a document so it doesn't matter.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yea, everybody should have the libraries installed, but...
A) Its wasteful. Loading the Qt and KDE libraries on my GNOME system eats up about 6 to 8 megs of RAM. Times that by 4, which it will be by the time the 2.0 series comes around, thats 24-32 meg for the GUI libraries!
B) It's unnecessary. Programming structures aside, GNOME and KDE are not terribly different. Sure on the surface they look different, but at the core, they do the same thing, and they both do it in mostly the same way. Whats the point of the redundancy. Back when the KDEvsGNOME flame wars were going on, people were complaining about the duplicated programming effort. I could care less about that, what about the duplicated burden on my memory!
C) New office apps should not demand a high power system. Bloat is bloat wether it comes from Linux or Windows. Office is bloated and GNOME/KDE together is bloated. The whole point of Linux is elegance and speed (and stability for the sysadmins.) It's silly when Gobe Productive, (which whoops Abiword, and comes damn close to wordperfect) can load in less memory than GNOME. (6-7 megs.) The desktop UI should not put that much of a burden on the system. One of the evangalists for DirectX was saying how MS puts an 80% OS tax on everything. Linux is becoming no different. The OS tax should be down around 10% like it is in BeOS. (Maybe 20% for all the extra stuff in Linux, but still way lower than it is now.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
DISCLAMER: Some sense of asthetics is necessary to appreciate this post. People using FVWM need not read further. /w Sawmill is probably the most asthetically pleasing GUI out there. (Nice looking without being garish. Probably the best looking GUI in my taste) It is also farily fast and stable (with XFree4.0 and some tweeks) For those of you who like KDE, KDE is just as good. Now with these good desktops out, why does Corel continue to use the basic X widgets. Not only does it add bloat, it looks ugly. The reason is that they cannot count on everybody having GNOME or KDE installed, or those that do, having enough RAM to support both GTK and Qt if they have a different one from the one Corel uses. This hodgepodge of libraries will grow by two in the coming year. GNOME 2.0 and KDE 2.0 will come out which will increase the memory use even more. Thus, developers will continue to use custom (and inconsistant) widgets, or use the standard X widgets. Neither is an acceptable option for most people. As you've guessed by now, this is a cry for a standard widget set. (Not window manager mind you, just widget set and environment.) With a clearly defined standard so many window managers could easily implant themselves into the system, the resultant desktop would be both functional and flexible. Now the obsessive choice people scream out, "But we want freedom! That's not what Linux is about!" I tell them to ask themselves. What freedom are you asking about? There are only three significantly different GUIs at the core level (not the interface/window manager level, the environment level, like GNOME core) One of them, GNUStep, is hardly developed for. The other is the standard X libraries which get the bulk of the development, and the other is GNOME/KDE which are very different at the interface level, and maybe implementation details, but essentially try to solve the same thing. One uses KOM, the other tries to use Cobra and Bonobo, but both are trying to make reusable objects. Do you care if your reusable objects use one tech vs. the other? Sure they look different, but thats a theme/window manager thing. Now maybe it isn't a problem now, but as applications become larger, developers will be increasingly reluctant to develop for either KDE or GNOME. Take KDevelop for example. I like GNOME, but I like KDevelop too. So I run KDevelop under GNOME and just eat the extra 15-20 meg of memory usage. What does this have to do with meta creations? I'm getting to that. Metacreations represents standard mainstream apps that are being ported to Linux. We have two good GUIs on Linux, but it is doubtful that these apps will use either, for fear of locking people out. So we have some nice apps tethered with ugly GUIs. As more apps are ported, this will hinder Linux's mainstream acceptance. People don't like ugly apps. In the real world, ascthetics counts for a lot, especially among the graphics artists crowd. Why do you think SGIs and Macs look so nice? In addition, among most normal people, asthetics counts. I can't work in a ugly room, I wouldn't buy an ugly desk, and I don't like reading ugly documents. Same for my computer. Wordperfect 8 for linux is highly functional, but I hate using it because it is so ugly. I use Abiword instead, which leaves something to be desired. (Actually, I use BeOS most of the time, but when I do use Linux, its Abiword.) At least it supports GTK nicely. Choice is a great thing, but intelligance is too. A well planned, well thought out, carefully executed GUI can have both flexibility, and functionality. Take the BeOS GUI. The actual stuff associated with the UI is very small. This portion can be switched out quite easily, with the major underlying technologies intact. Sure this means that you're stuck to either COM or COBRA (COBRA sucks btw. COM is fast and elegant, Cobra is flexible and slow, 'nuff said) but I doubt many end users care one way or the other.
______________________________________________
Take a look at Corel Wordperfect for Linux. Then take a look at the windows version. Which looks more pleasing? The windows version of course. Take a look at the Corel help file for Linux, then take a look at the one for windows. Which one isn't a garish shade of blue? Linux has advanced significantly in the prettyiness department, and GNOME
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What would be really cool is to take the pressure sensitive fractal drawing tools in painter and put them into Corel Draw. Definitely some cool possibilities.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Yeah well, I've seen Cult3D as well.
All of these 3d plugins are neat tricks, they have
a certain gee whiz value when you first play with them.
For about 5 minutes.
But it's not something to base a whole business on. The analogy to me would be Adobe chucking away all it's products except Acrobat reader and Acrobat writer or Macromedia dropping everything except flash.
Metacreations had a range of tools widely used by consumers and professionals, now they are one more browser plugin vendor in what is, as you say, a very competitive market.
RIP Metacreations, and lets hope Corel has the sense to keep developing KPT, Painter, etc
WOW! lets folks who know something about graphics answer the questions. 72 dpi is critical because it is the standard. Postscript is important because it is the standard. Everything uses postscript. The problem is, there is postscript output, and then there is sh*tty postscript. CorelDraw is the latter, for instance, which is why service bureaus will charge you more. Your postscript may be fine on your desktop printer but chokes when it runs at 2450 dpi imagesetter.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Well, if ESR is right and
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
then perhaps this AOL-ization of Linux may be a good thing. A good idea might be to get the Netscape-like bug feedback modules working
- passion
Yeah, i agree that bryce is nice. Its gonna come down to who has the "home" system. What system was the code written for. As a person who has been involved with the porting of major application software, porting from Windows to Macintosh is not easy. Porting to Windows is not bad, but back, is harder. Linux, on the other hand, can be quite difficult. If anyone has used a professional compiler (no knock against gcc, but i am referring to a development ide / package, such as VSS, Borland, or Metrowerks), you know that there are different things you have to do to get code to behave under these environments than than gcc.
For instance, the windows Abode products (AFAIK... i could have been taught incorrectly) were at one time Macintosh applications, written and maintaned in Codewarrior, and then ported to Windows. The Mac versions were leaner, nicer, more stable applications, because of its home.
Java, in the heyday of its glory, was supposed to solve this problem. We all know how this turned out.
Software porting is no easy task. Like porting software from windows to windows CE is no easy re-compile, and oftentimes even the most well abstracted UNIX code needs many tweaks for efficiency on different platforms.
Well i wish them luck in any porting endeavor. Its a good thing for appearances, but the marketing will have to pick up the slack in the linux user base, and the current enterprise state of Mac and Windows.
--jay
I disagree, and I'll say why just after this:
DISC: I'm not a lawyer, financial planner, stock broker, or accountant, nor do I play them on TV. Spend your money however you want, and don't cry to me if you lose your shirt.
I bought CORL in september when it was about 6. I knew that Corel Linux would be coming out soon, and saw it flutter between 1-5 for a while. With the recent acceptance for RHAT on the market, I figured this would be a no-brainer.
I was right. Watched it go all the way to 44. The stock market *did* take notice of what Corel was doing, and the stock value rose as a result.
Then some funny things happened to the company, and I sold. Took my money and plunked it down on someone else (who isn't doing as nicely, but didn't drop as much as CORL did).
What a particular stock does day-to-day should not concern you, unless you're a day trader. Sure it's down today. So were a lot of other stocks (the NASDAQ was down 258 points today, whaddya expect?).
The question you have to ask yourself is: Will there be a time in the future where someone will want to pay more than what you paid for this stock? If yes, buy more. If no, hold or sell.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Many great points in your post but I must disagree with you on the App vs OS. MSFT has maintained dominance through their ability to link their OS to the business productivity apps such as MS Office.
On the hardware point you are very correct, no Mac based production houses will switch to Linux in the near future, OS X will be tough enough for the time being. All the same Corel will need to make a PPC compliant version of linux if they want to get into current Mac markets.
For the market we are talking about (graphic design/desktop publishing) what it would take to get Linux moving in this market is the full support of Adobe with all their apps/fonts etc being ported to Linux......crazy you say? They will be porting them to OS X and thus are probably making the code switch to a unix compatible codebase (surely they wouldn't be dumb enough to tie themselves to just the Mac platform in that switch) and thus I think that you will see an Adobe apps on linux/unix not too long after they make the OS X switch. Apple may be unwittingly setting themselves up for a future switch to Linux. The only way they can prevent this is to provide things that are not available in the linux community like drivers for most of the common devices, much as they have done for USB and firewire.
So my question is does anybody know if Corel is making a PPC version and is Adobe writing OS X native versions of their apps that will be generally unix compliant..or will they just be OS X compliant.
no sig.
if bryce and poser come out for linux, i will be able to dump my windoze partition forever!!!! yaaah!!!!!
>
s .html#A704 (;) http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/paperta pe.html (.)
Hardly; type size is still expressed most commonly in "points" measurement. That's a standard that's been unchallenged worldwide for several centuries; I'm not aware of any move to revise it, with the exception of some web page and similar coding that expresses typesizes in effect as percentages of a user-selected base size, but even that base is expressed in points.
"Points" are a subdivision of a measurement unit called "picas." There are 12 points to a pica, and roughly 72-1/3 picas to a foot.
The source code for DTP originates in the first computerized newspaper typesetting systems, and before that in the teletypesetter (TTS) standard. See generally http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/DWcode
Pica-point measurements are so thoroughly engrained in DTP code that other measurements presented are normally converted internally from picas and points. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
I bought in the middle of February when the price was just about $17. I'm not a day trader, and I plan on owning the stock for years to come, so these daily 3% ups and downs are really of no consequence. I'll dump the stock if and when I see some compelling evidence that there is something fundamentally unsound with their business.
:-)
Unlike most companies who deal with Linux, Corel actually has a good product that isn't free. They stand to make a profit off something other than slow, barely-competent email support (which is all Red Hat ever gave me). What's more, there's really no serious competition in the office suite department. (Star Office? Please.)
I may be in the minority, but I see Corel as having more to offer Linux than VA (maybe even Red Hat). I'm going to do some more research on them, but right now I'm heavily leaning toward doubling or tripling the number of shares I own. I think they're a bargain at $10.
Of course, at the rate Red Hat is going, it won't be long before CORL will be worth more than RHAT.
Corel is a company that has (to a degree) "embraced" open-source software. However, they sell software, a tricky thing (at best) to do with with open-source.
They may make all sorts of software available for Linux, but I don't believe that they can open the source code up for each and every piece of software they create or port over. It's just not viable for Corel as a company.
That doesn't mean that they can't make open-source software, it just means that they can't make it all open-source, and keep their shareholders happy.
I also think that they may go the route of making some software (light/lite versions) free (as in beer) for personal use... to keep the average Linux user reasonably happy.
BlackNova Traders
The problem the market has with Corel is that Cowpland is running the show and he is an idiot.
He is currently under investigation for insider selling. He has been known to open his mouth and say things like "this quarter looks great" and two weeks later Corel comes out with their quarterly statement showing an almost $10M loss. He has been known to make grandiose claims about working with Intel, which his PR staff must hurridly back-pedal from while Intel's PR staff claims to not have a clue what he is talking about.
The guy is a wildcard, jumping on every bandwagon that comes along (remember the netwinders, which got spun off, or how about the all-java office-suite which had to be cancelled after over a year of hype). Merril Lynch has withdrawn all rating of Corel, stating that the company is too unpredictable for them to reliabily evaluate, which means that their analysts do not trust what Cowpland says.
Ironic since ML is a very large shareholder of Borland/Inprise which Corel is essentially stealing from Borland shareholders (he gets over $200M in cash and a strong revenue stream, shareholders get a 3/4ths of a corel share, a company that is teetering on bankruptcy and has no strong sense of direction, much less a reasonable revenue stream).
Replace Cowpland with a reputable CEO and Corel's price will double in just a couple of weeks. Until then, the street will have no faith in the company and all we will see are short-term spikes amidst a consistent long-term downturn.
Yep, this is exactly how I felt. Kai Krause no longer has
much to do with the company, with the exception that his name is
associated with some of its products.
I believe that he has even quit the board of directors -
but don't quote me on that. I'm sure you can
see for yourself on MetaCreations' web site.
As for whether I believe it's another "next big thing"...
I do. The reason is because Metastream has already signed
with 25 partners to provide the technology base. And -
kids have fun with it!! On the contrary to VRML,
which kids said "It takes too long" and "it looks
like crap." Metastream is something that (when I
saw it at the party) could actually captivate a 5
year old girl. Can anyone say toy retailers?
The truth is that VRML was too far ahead of its time...
It tried to push too much data down the pipe, and failed
to deliver on its promise. Metastream is different.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Corel may be scoffed at by some people who don't like what they're doing with Linux, or their lisences that are questionable in terms of violating the GPL, but they are actually helping a great deal in making Linux usable as a desktop OS for non-programmers.
I don't know of any GPL violations in any of the code and/or products they've released. There has been some consternation between some Wine users (I haven't seen any developers complain) WRT: Corel's internal code fork of Wine for their product releases. Wine is under the BSD license and as such this is strictly allowed. I think some of the Debian people had an issue or two which wound up being resolved to everyone's satisfaction...
Can you substantiate the claim that they've broken the GPL with any of their product releases?
I disagee. I personally want to know what is going on, the "conceptual model" as you put it, but there shouldn't be a mandate that all computer users have to grasp that. Some people simply do not want to understand what is going on. They use the computer as a tool, and often a very limited one, and they are content with that. There is nothing wrong with this type of user. If a computer user wants to browse the web a bit, and maybe do some word processing, and check their email, maybe occasionally play solitaire, and that is the extent of what they want to use their computer for, why shouldn't they be able to do that? Distributions such as Corel's give a user a free (beer and speech) alternative to Windows or MacOS.
The Open Source philosophy is about choice, freedom to do what you want with the resources provided for you by thousands of hackers. I think it fits right in line with this philosophy to have dumbed down distributions.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
This could be a sign of Corel's plans to establish an OS beachhead - forget about using Linux as an internet appliance OS. Instead, put Linux's power to use as a graphics workstation OS. Macs are still used in one major business area, and that's the graphics/multimedia sector. Management said, "Screw what everyone else is doing, this system works better and we're going to use it." Build a better system, and they might switch over.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
You really don't know what you are talking about. Why don't you pull out your ruler and check what the real dpi of your monitor is? In all of the latest Macs none of the "Recommended" settings yield a dpi close to 72 dpi. And why would a PC be any different? They both have the same resolutions on monitors the same size, so math PROVES that they must have the same dpi. Just because the software says you have 72dpi does not mean you do. You do not have 72 dpi. A PC does not have 96 dpi. DPI is old school designers' tool to try and understand electronic design, when the two have nothing in common.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
""Until Linux has ... 72 dpi screen resolution.""
"Support is already there. In Xfree86, you can either directly configure your screen's DPI, or you can indirectly specify it by using a combination of mode definition and physical screen size (using the DisplaySize declaration). "
I thought that they had 75 and 100 dpi why is 72 so important/critical?
""...output in native Linux format...""
"Ah, but that's the beauty. Linux doesn't have a native format. A Linux machine can be used to generate just about any openly-defined output format you would like, such as PostScript. Almost any image format is also supported. The
genius of open formats is that, by using them, your service bureau can use the platform of its choice and you don't have to care.
"
The gimp has it's own internal format for gimp use if that's what you mean. I don't see the use in having another thing that a browser can't read and needs me to start up a very, very large memory hog (I had to increase my swap size just for gimp use).
Also is it just me or are there very, few methods to access postscript. If it's such a standard why are there not more ways to say print a postscript file in any word processor? I know there's ghostscript but I think that's a little klugy and such. There is good support in the browser for pdf but not postscript on the majority of public machines that I have seen.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
More accessable software on more platforms is a good step, but they are gonna need to port the thing first! That is a hell of an effort, in development and testing. You gotta think you are going across a compiler and across to a different paradigm OS. Its gonna take some serious re-thinking in certain poits to push it over to linux, if that is indeed what they are gonna do.
In time, the ports will come, but the manpower will be pretty large. Nobody dump your macs or windows partitions yet...
--jay
Expensive / proprietary Unix workstations long held the high-end graphics market, and Macs the low-end. Win32 is becoming the dominant platform, but it's not there yet. This could be a great arena for Linux to shine. Remember how long Macs hung around simply because they did graphics well? If Linux could get its GUI problems straightened out, it could emerge as the digital artist's machine of choice. I know that 90% of graphical designers who are now forced to work on Win32 long for the days of Macs...
On a related link: MacOs X for Linux?
Corel's Linux distro is pretty much an attempt to make Linux easier for Windows users to switch over. While it isn't for a "real" Linux user, I suppose, it is a great "My First Linux," so to speak.
In what way? because it has a nice GUI? all it is is a dressed up KDE. Because it doesn't include a bunch of daemons preinstalled for you? yeah "real" linux users wouldn't be able to figure that out I guess.
I find it quite strange that "everyone" calls Corel's distro only for newbies. Corel wants to make Linux easy to use, and I think they have done that. They want to bring (more) major applications to Linux, and they are doing that (Corel Office 2000, Corel Draw is on it's way, etc)
One thing they will never be able to do is to take the power of Linux away from users. Linux is still an Open OS. If you think Corel Linux is missing something, install it, if you don't like their version of KDE, don't install it, install your own WhizzBangWM (tm).
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
I don't know how many of you follow Corel's stock, but it closed down today. (It would have started to react from the news by closing time if it were going to, I bet.)
Corel's stock closed below 10 today, down from a 52 week high around 30. I know I lost a good chuck of change the last couple time they announced good news, and the stock went down.
The market doesn't seem to understand what the company does. It seems to me to be a stock that has a lot of potential. It frustrates me to think I am the only person seeing this. I think Corel stands to gain a lot by having a "one stop" Linux distribution (with WordPerfect, and now maybe painter.) They are positioning themselves in a good place for a market which can only expand (end user everything you need is included Linux.)
So what's up with the stock. I almost want to buy some more since it is under 10, but I have been burned by it too many times when I thought "Well, it can't go much lower than this!"
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Last summer, MetaCreations decided to change its core focus from its bread-and-butter graphics software business to its E-commerce visualization business. Approximately October, MetaCreations decided to sell its graphics software division to cut down on expenses and such.
Above I said "E-commerce visualization." What I mean by this is their Metastream platform for bringing 3D over the web. Basically, just like a JPEG file, the model data (including textures) is streamed to you over a plain old HTTP connection. From this, the viewer gradually displays more and more 3D data to the user, just like a JPEG can be rendered gradually. Sorry, at the moment, there are only Windows and Mac plugins for Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers. This is the stuff that I worked on - lemme just say that it rocks.
Here's what they plan on doing as a business:
The technology is amazing. I went to the launch party for Metastream 3.0, and it is a world of difference from Metastream 2.0 (which is what I worked on). With the new format, you can easily do animations. For instance, you have a television and a VCR, with a VHS tape on the side. Click the tape - and it slides into the VCR. You can even see the LCD display on the VCR change.
Want something cooler? Okay. How's this: Once the tape is in the VCR, hit the play button. Guess what you get? Live streaming video displayed on the television. This video isn't stored in the Metastream file - it can be video from anywhere on the web. Also, you can rotate, zoom, slide - whatever you want while the video is playing. And even on a moderate consumer PC - such as a PII or PIII, you don't see ANY slowdown.
And there's more - the compression technology is awesome as hell. The average model file is less than 50 K (and that's a pretty big model - like a person or something. The television/VCR above would be 20 to 30 Kilobytes).
As of right now, MetaCreations is a publicly traded company (MCRE). I do not know what their plans are about spinning off Metastream as a company of its own, however, they do have their own offices in New York.
The opinions expressed above are opinions of my own. They are not necessarily the opinions of MetaCreations or Metastream.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
While I'm sure the Corel angle is why this story is on ./, I'd just like to say it's sad to see MetaC's management take the company in a "new direction" which is risky, at best, and likely the first move into a tailspin that'll end in the company tanking.
I've used bunches of their software, dating to before they were MetaStream. They used to be two separate companies... Fractal Design (who made Painter) and er... well, I forget the name of Kai's old company... I also used (and still use) Ray Dream, which Fractal Design had bought shortly before the Kai/Fractal merger.
I've got poser, Kai power tools, Ray Dream, and Bryce... all really cool tools. I hope Corel is good to them, but from what I've seen in the industry, once a product starts wandering from one company to another, it stops being innovative and fresh, and just ends up cranking out fairly minor releases while it falls beind the times.
Of course, a few of the tools I mentioned are not a part of this deal... who knows where (if anyplace) they will end up.
It just leaves you wondering what flavor of crack the MetaCreations management is smoking. They have apparently laid off a bunch of programmers, dumped these poducts on the floor, all in the hope that everyone is going to want fancy 3D images on their e-commerce site, rather than a good ol' picture.
Why dump viable products to focus on this? Why not develop both together, or maybe develop a spin-off company to develop the MetaStream format they are going on about?
I heard people on a mailing list for their products rumble when Kai left the company a while ago... perhaps that was the first sign of trouble.
Oh well. I picked upo my Bryce 4.0 upgrade last week from MetaC, so I'm set. No telling if I'd get the chance to do it in the future. And hey, maybe I will get a chance to see Bryce on Linux. At the very least, it would be nice if they released the port of Bryce to Be that they had working. That's why I had put off upgrading for so long.
Hang on just a second. Metacreations was a company with a small but successful niche market in prosumer content creation tools. KPT was THE standard for Photoshop plugins and their other tools had a pretty loyal base of happy customers.
And instead they've chucked it in for promoting a technology that has has plenty of internet enabled buzzwords but no real appeal.
Everything you've described could be done by VRML 2.0 in 1996. Remember how that took the world by storm?
Ah, that's right it didn't.
Do you really think it's a compelling application for consumers to be able to spin a 3d model of a widget before they buy it? And if they really want to, then you can already do this with VRML, Shout3d or QuicktimeVR.
Metacreations has chucked away a solid business based on good software for a grab at buzzword enabled IPO e-commerce madness.
At least some other company had the sense to buy their good technology when Metacreations was chucking it out for a song.
What I am impressed with, however, is the amount of desktop software that Corel is bringing to Linux as we speak. Word Perfect Office 2000 looks every bit as powerful as MS Office. Looks to me like Corel is really trying hard to get a platform that is a useable workstation for any user, and doesn't depend on Microsoft.
Corel may be scoffed at by some people who don't like what they're doing with Linux, or their lisences that are questionable in terms of violating the GPL, but they are actually helping a great deal in making Linux usable as a desktop OS for non-programmers.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but Corel has to make some cash somehow: I'm wondering how strong the commitment to OpenSource is. Is anyone else worried that future versions of Corel-owned Linux software are going to be closed? I wouldn't be too terribly surprised.
I don't see Corel as being a strictly Open Source company at all. But this is not a bad thing - personally I don't think that Linux is just about open source. From where I'm sitting, I see Corel's business movements as a realignment of their business model towards providing a version of Linux that is easy to use for beginners, and to additionally provide as wide a range of familiar programs to those new users as possible. The average Linux newbie is likely to be used to paying for software so this gambit is probably feasable as a source of income. Plus the rest of us have the option to buy software which fulfills specific needs which are not currently addressed by the available open source projects, such as CorelDraw 9.
In fact, I see Corel's movements as being a definite boon to Linux. They will pull new users to the world of Linux and will provide yet more software into the Linux world. Just because it is likely that they will be selling software doesn't automatically make them into the Evil Empire. To be able to stay in Linux and use Bryce, or Poser, or whatever would be a great help for many users. If they price it too high they will suffer the usual market drought that afflicts over-priced products. And the GPL/LGPL stops Corel from closing their sources on code that adds onto existing GPL/LGPL code bases so don't panic. If they write their own software and they want to sell it - fine!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.