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Corel Sells GraphicCorp Division
Zalgon 26 McGee writes: "Corel has announced the sale of their GraphicCorp division to Hemera, according to a report on CBC News Online. Is this just another step in Corel's death spiral? A way to hide assets from creditors? Or some of the bold leadership Corel needs to find their way again?" Weren't we asking the same questions last week?
star awful-ice is a heap of shit. it's bloated, slow, and forces that horrible browser/file manager/word processor metaphor down your throat. what sort of godless wretch would design such a useless interface?
now... consider mozilla. it's taken two years to get to the point where they are considering a beta release. star awful-ice is (in my estimation) at least twice as big as mozilla - (correct me if i'm wrong, please) you do the math.
and even if star awful-ice does grow to dominate the linux office suite market, there are going to be high-quality alternatives, such as abiword.
until sun gets their act together with star awful-ice, more power to corel. they are leading the way for commercial software houses, by proving that their apps can be ported to linux. they have good products (quattro pro kicks excel's ass any day) and are a good company, despite their current financial problems.
plus, with corel's current level of commitment to linux, if they go under it's a possibility that they will just release their code. i'd much rather see the code for wp/qpro released than the trash from sun.
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WordPerfect and PhotoPaint in their Linux versions are Win32 .exe's, running under Wine. You can check that yourself (the /usr/bin/photopaint thing is a shell script, launching wine and a /usr/lib/corel/[...]/paint.exe which is the actual program).
They're not native linux binaries, using libwine.
As I said, check for yourself.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
So what if Corel has sold off its library of graphics? It didn't sell off its software (like CorelDraw), and it kept royalty-free redistribution rights. So Corel spun off an non-core buisness. Big deal.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Corel should just bow down to Microsoft and let Office reign supreme. Ever since the helpful magic paperclip, MS Office ruled!
Rader
In fact, having a former life in the photographic industry, I could never figure out what Corel was doing in the stock photographic / images business anyhow. The quality of their libraries were fairly well below the industry normals in addition to some fairly draconian and muddled contract agreements.
In particular, there was an instance where a former employer of mine used some Corel stock images for their catalog. The photographer who actually took the shots summarily attempted to sue my former employer. When Corel was contacted, we learned that certain images in the library were still property of the original artist.
This caused us some deal of confusion since this is not the not the norm for stock photographic images.
This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel), its about time they started dumping their ancillary business and focusing on software development, rather than services like stock imagery.
I wish them luch, I've been using Corel Wordperfect Office on Win98 and Win2k just to avoid supporting MS Office. I would like to see Corel survive. the new Redmond Applications unit will need competitors.
Corel Office 2000 is a bargain! You can get the whole darned suite for $20 at most places (OEM version) If people cant buy this product at THAT price, then Microsoft will never have any competition I guess.
What would it take for Corel to regain the Office market? How inexpensive do they have to make their products before they're seen as an alternative to MS?
I'm not positive about this, but I'm pretty sure WordPerfect is the only Windows platform product that supports DocBook, anyone have info on others? I dont think Word supports this?
The success of Corel would be a Goodthing(tm), We need more companies like Corel and Adobe that are not swallowed up by Microsoft. I wish them luck, and will continue to support them.
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
I'm from Ottawa, and something else that was in the news here today (which I doubt appeared anywhere else) is that they closed one of their satellite offices in town to consolidate into their main building. This is logical cost-cutting, and as it doesn't affect their main businesses, I think it's a Good Thing.
Corel's WordPerfect has been viewed as their unique advantage. However, WordPerfect isn't even really a Linux application! It's a Windows application running emulated under WINE. They don't say that on the box, either. Quattro, their other "advantage", runs excellently in native mode under Linux, but it's not Corel's any longer, since their merger with Borland/Inprise fell through.
How much of an advantage will Corel retain once other Linux distributions pick up StarOffice and when Free Software developers put real work into it?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Honestly, I don't think StarOffice will have that much of an effect, GPL or no GPL. As others have pointed out, it's an absolutely enourmous codebase, and while Open Source has a great track record on projects suited to it (such as the kernel itself) you only need to check out Mozilla for proof that there are some projects it isn't as well suited to, and it is no panacea. StarOffice looks a lot more like Mozilla than Linux to me. At best I expect that if StarOffice is GPLd it will be a boost to projects like AbiWord that will be able to cull it for useful snippets.
Quattro is of course not affected by the Borland merger falling through, but you know that by now. Quattro and WP itself are IMOP far superior products to the M$ competitors, that have been beaten rather badly solely as a consequence of M$ marketing clout resting on control of the OS. Their strategy of trying to produce an end-user friendly linux distro and convert Windows users to Linux (knowing full well that their products simply by virtue of being commercial are unacceptable to a good chunk of existing linux users, and that the people that could be customers are not going to be that eager to change operating systems) is a ballsy move, and I am honestly a little disappointed you seem to want to give them short shrift. Win or lose, they're fighting the good fight against Redmond, and you have to admire that.
I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble getting WP working, but the earlier version that I have here works just fine, I can't help thinking this must be a problem particular to your installation. Admittedly I don't use it that often (I'm a text editor type not a word processor type by inclination, and I also avoid using proprietary software when I can reasonably avoid it) but it is very handy for converting word documents, and adding formatting to text before printing it out, and I've certainly gone well over 4 pages in it. With my link I won't even attempt to download StarOffice, but I have had occasion to use it on another machine, and I must say I was singularly unimpressed. Big (enourmous actually) slow clunky and not at all in the same league as WP. Maybe the subset of hackers that really want an office suite will find it usable, but I don't see many secretaries finding it usable - or many financial officers wanting to write big checks for hardware upgrades to run it at an acceptable speed for that matter.
Finally, I want to say that the programs in the WP suite are far from Corels "unique advantages" - but I have to admit at the moment that statement may be fair. That's what they have on Linux right now. If they can survive a few more months we may see far bigger stuff ported though - things like CorelDraw, Painter, Bryce, and Ventura. WordPerfect is a toy compared to Ventura. The GIMP is great for basic graphics manipulation, but it's no Corel Painter. And I can't think of any Free Software that even attempts to be comparable to Bryce. Truly professional level painting, 3d modelling, and DTP programs are things that the hackers can and will live without, but they are also things that a great many offices cannot. These offices will therefore have no choice but to continue to run Windows or Macs if Corel goes down.
Given all that, I honestly don't see your position here. And I usually find myself agreeing with what you write.
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