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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.
"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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: remove whitespace to e-mail me
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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: remove whitespace to e-mail me
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.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
"The Gimp may make many things possible, but it will never prevail until it makes many things easy."
Ahh however it dosn't work if you want to offer thousand of wizband features. Even the most "easy to use" software program will have problems getting people to understand how it operates.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
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
Corel is hardly "sucker punching" Microsoft. MS does not make any high end graphical tools... Photodraw does not count, neither does picture-it. They are looking for market share, and greater acceptance in the linux community perhaps, IMO. They also know that Wordperfect has an incredibly hard time competing against Office...
It would be interesting to see if MS would port linux to office. That would really bring out some competition.
--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
Yeah. Unless you're interested in doing print work. Or using some of the sophisticated colorspace manipulations. Don't get me wrong. GIMP's a great piece of code. But it's not in the same class as Photoshop.
Living Legacy of Consumption Culture
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.
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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.
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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.