Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the and-somebody-somewhere-cares dept.
Scowling writes "It's been confirmed now that Cowpland has resigned from Corel in order to pursue opportunities supporting Linux start-ups." What sort of support he can provide for them remains to be seen considering Corel's history of with Linux (Releasing Word Perfect:Good, Screwing Debian: Bad)
Re:Corel screwed Debian?
by
Master+Bait
·
· Score: 3
Hear hear!
Maybe Cowpland left Corel to pursue Linux interests from his jail cell. Isn't he under a lot of heat for insider trading?
Anyway, he's a nut. He made Corel happen in the first place, but he also caused their difficulties. I wish some good software company would buy them out.
blessings,
-- "Only in their dreams can men truly be free
'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
would someone please explain how corel screwed debian? --
He was the dead weight, hope they hire a star
by
afflatus_com
·
· Score: 4
I like the things Corel are doing, especially WINE support, but alot of the negative image of the company lately is derived from his personality at the helm in the Linux era at the end of 1999: frothing at the mouth at tradeshows, showing stock graphs of Corel versus RedHat, and his insider trading scandals following him. I like Corel as a company: they put out pretty good software at fairly reasonable price, sold their prior version numbers of software at steep discounts, and gave free software out to the business offices of most non-profit charities I was a part of. Cowpland, though, just isn't a good front man to represent the company at this time.
I think Corel, after an initial jitter, will be better off without Cowpland right now. I hope that they can get someone with the right attitude and direction with some degree of star power to be the front man for the company as Linus is to Transmeta.
--- "And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
--
----- Cast a Cold Eye On Life, on Death Horseman, pass by --W.B. Yeats' gravestone
A lot of people are involved with Corel, and few of its failures are entirely Cowpland's fault. (It's always easy to pin crimes on a public figure, but that doesn't make them guilty!)
Sorry, but Cowpland is/was the President and CEO of Corel, so he is responsible its failures. It is his responsibility to ensure the company makes the right decisions -- whether by him or someone accountable to him. The buck stops with him. If he has incompetent people working for him, it is duty to replace them.
I don't know how Corel screwed Debian, they certainly contributed a lot to Wine and were responsive to licensing issues, but if Corel screwed up, Cowpland takes the heat in the end.
Re:Beginning of the end for WordPerfect?
by
Jason+Earl
·
· Score: 3
Exactly, Corel is going to end up as a classic case of "too little, too late." Their waning marketshare on Windows is not going to save them. Outside the legal profession PerfectOffice users are about as likely to upgrade to MS Office as they are to buy the newest version of PerfectOffice. And on the Linux side there is little chance that they are going to be able to compete with the coming Gnome Office/StarOffice juggernaut. A component based Free Software office suite is going to clean up in the Linux sphere. It will be included with all of the distributions, and will become a critical part of the GNU/Linux infrastructure.
That leaves Corel with some nice graphics programs, in a market that appears to be moving in Adobe's favor. I would be getting out too.
What exactly does Corel do now, anyhow?
by
xtal
·
· Score: 4
Us Canucks do owe Cowpland something for helping kickstart tech in Ottawa; He's been there a long time. That, and who can miss his enhancement of the landscape with plastic mates *cough* and italian cars..:)
I have to wonder though - what's corel doing now, anyhow? It seems like they haven't done anything interesting in a long time, and the more I think about it, they haven't done anything new in an even longer time! They drew a lot of attention to Linux, but if the company goes under, that could backfire too - "Linux can't compete" FUD.
Corel Draw and Wordperfect are dead horses. Photoshop who? Office? Now the Gnome Foundation effort looks a lot more promising. Lots of people don't know the Wordperfect for Linux is a REALLY
bad port of Wordperfect that has been around on Slowaris for a long time; My school had it on the sun boxes, right down to the horrible fonts. Gnome really needs a font manager like windows.
Corel has some nice vector drawing packages, and I think they still do Ventura, but that's been old school for some time now. It's a pale shadow of what they used to be (I think Photoshop might have done them in; Adobe has always been a bigger threat to them than Microsoft ever was).
There's more than enough Linux distributions already. From what I can tell, none of the for profit ones are making any money, either, but I could be wrong. Hardly a good thing to base a company model on. They did great work on Wine, but they're planning on use it to sell already obsolete non-native software.
I don't really know what corel is going to do now, though. Support old software? Ick. I bet there's money to be made in selling their stock short though!:)
Speaking as someone who has worked for Corel in the past, it's FANTASTIC that Cowpland finally resigned. He may be great at starting a business, but he's terrible at actually running one.
Writing Wordperfect office from scratch in Java was his brainchild. Anyone remember that little gem?
Most people don't know that Corel was writing an office suite for Windows from scratch in the year before they bought Wordperfect. (it was discarded after the Wordperfect purchase).
Cowpland's habit of directing the company to work on ridiculously ambitious projects, then abandoning them when they become obviously stinky has cost them dearly, in both high employee turnover (particularly managers - 4 out of 5 in my area quit when WPforJava was canned) and in taking both talent and focus away from their core product lines (Draw! and Paint!).
Some other examples of Corel side projects (from my personal Corel experience):
Corel Family Tree (team of about 15 people)
- project was sold to another company for a pittance when they finally clued in that the family tree software market wasn't exactly huge.
Corel WEB.DATA (team of about 10)
- wow, use your favourite Paradox database to generate dynamic web pages. (estimated 3 copies sold).
Corel WEB.Forms (team of 5)
- hey, let's ignore JetForm, also based in Ottawa, a company completely devoted to corporate form entry software, and write our own from scratch! Even better, let's tell our programmers to "just write something and develop it from there". Who needs market analysis? To be fair, Cowpland had nothing to do with this one, and the product manager responsible was subsequently sacked... But... Why did he have all this time on his hands in the first place??
Corel has pretended to be a database company (paradox), a web company (Corel Barista), an Office competitor (WP Suite), a video phone maker (CorelVIDEO!).
And I almost forgot about Corel's first foray into hardware...
At one point, everyone in the company had a CorelVIDEO box, a miniature video camera, and a 14" colour TV on their desk. 'Cause everyone needs a video phone!
No one used them after the novelty wore off.
Except of course, for the Pointy Haired Bosses who teleconferenced with the WordPerfect PHBs in Orem, Utah.
Good riddance, Cowpland! Maybe Corel will be able to concentrate on making a decent product instead of flitting from buzzword to buzzword. Bahhhh...
Corel's package management tool was linked against both libqt (version 1, not 2) and libapt (Debian's package management library, and GPLed). This was construed as a breach of the GPL, but was sorted out after the maintainer of libapt gave permission for it to be used. As well as this, the beta agreement stated that further redistribution of the software (pretty much all GPLed, remember) was forbidden.
I don't know, though. They sound like mistakes made by people who haven't really checked the GPL properly on one hand and an overzealous legal department on the other. Both were resolved fairly amicably, so I wouldn't call it "screwing" Debian.
Probably no one will give a satisfactory explanation of what Corel is accused of, or ask for their side of the story. Instead, Slashdot editors will make off-hand comments about it which will be accepted as truth by most readers without any further information. This is fairly typical.
I do appreciate getting opinions from the editors, and I know they aren't striving for objectivity in any way, but it would be nice to have links to the old stories that explained these topics so that readers can decide for themselves if Corel is truly evil or not.
FUD and Misinformation about Corel
by
Sleepy
·
· Score: 5
There's some FUD about Corel these days, and the Slashdot/Linux community does not do it better when they abandon responsible journalism with slanted posts like "Corel screwed Debian". Back up your assertions, or shut up I say. Corel did not screw Debian -- screwing someone is deliberate and somethng I usually reserve for Microsoft (like they screwed Bristol, Spyglass, Citrix, Apple, Netscape and the regular user who doesn't understand they've been screwed...)
It's safe to say that Debian more than any other distro, adheres to the "Free Software" philosophy. As such, there will be factions all over the map. Some do not want ANY commercialization of Debian and those fence-sitters have their fingers on the trigger itching for any company to make a mistake. Well, Corel made mistakes. Corel made mistakes with licensing, and Corel made some technical decisions that could be interpreted as mistakes (or arrogance). I do not think Corel has bad karma like say Microsoft or Sun, or we wouldn't see tremendous GIFTS such as WINE patches, free Corel Photopaint (amazing app!), and a staunch promotion of Linux knowing this can't turn them around overnight... and then some of us feel the need to spit in their face.
These people are still working their asses off to mature a necessary part of the applications market knowing that they've got another painful amputation/layoff on the way. If Corel disappears tomorrow, I feel they have made a positive impact on Linux that is every bit as good as Red Hat's, even if they were clumsy at times.
Corel made some technical decisions to break compatability with Slink (if you were not careful). What did that give them? It gave them a clear lead over anyone else in terms of usability from a Windows-convert point of view. Sure, it's all window dressing: the Printer Setup Wizard, Samba Wizard, the neat fonts, X-based dselect clone, the flash bootup and shutdown screens that look better than WIndows, and an installer my grandmother could sail through in 20 mins (it even handles booting NT correctly). This is all stuff you won't see as GPL'd Linux tools until 2001. I ran Corel 1.1 in the office, and 3 coworkers were so impressed they copied the CD. They've never run Linux before. Me, I run Debian Potato w/ some Woody, but if it weren't for the still-awful browser landscape in Linux I'm sure it could replace Windows for MOST people rather than some people. (Yeah, I know the browser stuff is getting better... Galeon w/ Gecko has motion blur these days it moves so fast).
Leave the FUD to that computer illiterate guy at ABC News -- he'll be writing gardening advice in a few years;)
I don't know how badly Copeland screwed Debian (I use it, and I've only heard this event referred to vaguely), but the one thing that puts Corel in a good light in my mind is their contribution to the WINE effort. Corel has been crucial in getting WINE to the state it is today (not perfect, but definately promising). Corel are definately not angels, and probably haven't been as nice to Free Software as IBM or SGI have, but Corel's extensive support of Linux was a very important factor in legitimizing Linux in the eyes of PHBs everywhere.
I know folks here on Slashdot will no doubt mailbomb me for saying so, but I have installed Corel Linux on a couple of machines and I have to say I was very pleased with both the install proceedure and the results. It installed flawlessly on my wife's Toshiba laptop as well. I have used various other distros from (RH, Mandrake (which is almost the same thing as RH in any case), Storm, Turbolinux, etc) and overall preferred either RH or Mandrake, but Corel was certainly a good distro to let someone who is new to Linux loose with.
Of course, now I am playing with FreeBSD and loving the experience. I guess I am an OS junkie...(BeOS was fun too)
-- "The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Is there a Corel-Screwed-Debian FAQ somewhere?
by
Christopher+B.+Brown
·
· Score: 4
Because I don't quite grasp where it is that Debian is crawling away feeling particularly violated.
There are several possibilities that come to mind as faintly plausible alternatives:
Corel Linux uses some pieces of KDE, and "Of course that is against all the principles Debian holds dear."
Corel Linux doesn't include all the development tools.
... And prevents you from adding them precisely how?
I installed Corel Linux on a laptop and added in all sorts of development tools from "Debian most-modern."
Corel has released "evil, proprietary" software like WordPerfect, CorelDraw, and Paradox that run on top of Corel Linux, as well as atop Debian.
... And if you can see the "violation" in this, you should probably see this as being a "violation" of the FSF rather than of Debian...
But none of these seem particularly convincing.
Presumably the person that contributed the story can elaborate on this by augmenting such a list with a real and true violation of Debian that Corel is responsible for?
-- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Didn't just screw with Linux
by
Shaheen
·
· Score: 3
They also screwed up MetaCreations' product line. They bought up almost all of MetaCreations' products, and now where are they? In development limbo. Dammit...
-- You should never take life too
seriously - You'll never get
out of it alive.
If anything, Corel increased Debian's popularity by allowing people unfamiliar with Linux to get started with it. Doesn't sound like "screwing Debian" to me.
Personally, I use Slackware. There is nothing better than.tgz packages (and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hate it when package management software bitches at you "PACKAGE X IS NOT INSTALLED" when in fact it is installed; you just compiled it by yourself instead of installing a retarded package).
Beginning of the end for WordPerfect?
by
Carey
·
· Score: 4
IMHO, there is no future for WordPerfect/Corel Office on either the UNIX or Windows platform.
Without open source code or a component model for developers, I don't see how they can progress with those products and expect support in marketplace.
Competing against Microsoft Office and now against the GNOME foundation, they look to be left out in the cold.
There are a lot of small offices and legacy applications built around WordPerfect functionality but I don't see a profitable business strategy there.
Hopefully with Cowpland leaving, someone can step up and save Corel as a company even if they have to strip it down.
Micheal Cowpland has done a lot of good for the high-tech industry in Ottawa and in Canada. I hope he can keep it going.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Cowpland left Corel to pursue Linux interests from his jail cell. Isn't he under a lot of heat for insider trading?
Anyway, he's a nut. He made Corel happen in the first place, but he also caused their difficulties. I wish some good software company would buy them out.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
would someone please explain how corel screwed debian?
--
I like the things Corel are doing, especially WINE support, but alot of the negative image of the company lately is derived from his personality at the helm in the Linux era at the end of 1999: frothing at the mouth at tradeshows, showing stock graphs of Corel versus RedHat, and his insider trading scandals following him. I like Corel as a company: they put out pretty good software at fairly reasonable price, sold their prior version numbers of software at steep discounts, and gave free software out to the business offices of most non-profit charities I was a part of. Cowpland, though, just isn't a good front man to represent the company at this time.
I think Corel, after an initial jitter, will be better off without Cowpland right now. I hope that they can get someone with the right attitude and direction with some degree of star power to be the front man for the company as Linus is to Transmeta.
---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
A lot of people are involved with Corel, and few of its failures are entirely Cowpland's fault. (It's always easy to pin crimes on a public figure, but that doesn't make them guilty!)
Sorry, but Cowpland is/was the President and CEO of Corel, so he is responsible its failures. It is his responsibility to ensure the company makes the right decisions -- whether by him or someone accountable to him. The buck stops with him. If he has incompetent people working for him, it is duty to replace them.
I don't know how Corel screwed Debian, they certainly contributed a lot to Wine and were responsive to licensing issues, but if Corel screwed up, Cowpland takes the heat in the end.
Exactly, Corel is going to end up as a classic case of "too little, too late." Their waning marketshare on Windows is not going to save them. Outside the legal profession PerfectOffice users are about as likely to upgrade to MS Office as they are to buy the newest version of PerfectOffice. And on the Linux side there is little chance that they are going to be able to compete with the coming Gnome Office/StarOffice juggernaut. A component based Free Software office suite is going to clean up in the Linux sphere. It will be included with all of the distributions, and will become a critical part of the GNU/Linux infrastructure.
That leaves Corel with some nice graphics programs, in a market that appears to be moving in Adobe's favor. I would be getting out too.
Us Canucks do owe Cowpland something for helping kickstart tech in Ottawa; He's been there a long time. That, and who can miss his enhancement of the landscape with plastic mates *cough* and italian cars.. :)
I have to wonder though - what's corel doing now, anyhow? It seems like they haven't done anything interesting in a long time, and the more I think about it, they haven't done anything new in an even longer time! They drew a lot of attention to Linux, but if the company goes under, that could backfire too - "Linux can't compete" FUD.
Corel Draw and Wordperfect are dead horses. Photoshop who? Office? Now the Gnome Foundation effort looks a lot more promising. Lots of people don't know the Wordperfect for Linux is a REALLY bad port of Wordperfect that has been around on Slowaris for a long time; My school had it on the sun boxes, right down to the horrible fonts. Gnome really needs a font manager like windows.
Corel has some nice vector drawing packages, and I think they still do Ventura, but that's been old school for some time now. It's a pale shadow of what they used to be (I think Photoshop might have done them in; Adobe has always been a bigger threat to them than Microsoft ever was).
There's more than enough Linux distributions already. From what I can tell, none of the for profit ones are making any money, either, but I could be wrong. Hardly a good thing to base a company model on. They did great work on Wine, but they're planning on use it to sell already obsolete non-native software.
I don't really know what corel is going to do now, though. Support old software? Ick. I bet there's money to be made in selling their stock short though! :)
..don't panic
Speaking as someone who has worked for Corel in the past, it's FANTASTIC that Cowpland finally resigned. He may be great at starting a business, but he's terrible at actually running one. Writing Wordperfect office from scratch in Java was his brainchild. Anyone remember that little gem? Most people don't know that Corel was writing an office suite for Windows from scratch in the year before they bought Wordperfect. (it was discarded after the Wordperfect purchase). Cowpland's habit of directing the company to work on ridiculously ambitious projects, then abandoning them when they become obviously stinky has cost them dearly, in both high employee turnover (particularly managers - 4 out of 5 in my area quit when WPforJava was canned) and in taking both talent and focus away from their core product lines (Draw! and Paint!). Some other examples of Corel side projects (from my personal Corel experience): Corel Family Tree (team of about 15 people) - project was sold to another company for a pittance when they finally clued in that the family tree software market wasn't exactly huge. Corel WEB.DATA (team of about 10) - wow, use your favourite Paradox database to generate dynamic web pages. (estimated 3 copies sold). Corel WEB.Forms (team of 5) - hey, let's ignore JetForm, also based in Ottawa, a company completely devoted to corporate form entry software, and write our own from scratch! Even better, let's tell our programmers to "just write something and develop it from there". Who needs market analysis? To be fair, Cowpland had nothing to do with this one, and the product manager responsible was subsequently sacked... But... Why did he have all this time on his hands in the first place?? Corel has pretended to be a database company (paradox), a web company (Corel Barista), an Office competitor (WP Suite), a video phone maker (CorelVIDEO!). And I almost forgot about Corel's first foray into hardware... At one point, everyone in the company had a CorelVIDEO box, a miniature video camera, and a 14" colour TV on their desk. 'Cause everyone needs a video phone! No one used them after the novelty wore off. Except of course, for the Pointy Haired Bosses who teleconferenced with the WordPerfect PHBs in Orem, Utah. Good riddance, Cowpland! Maybe Corel will be able to concentrate on making a decent product instead of flitting from buzzword to buzzword. Bahhhh...
http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /09/20/1051226.shtml
I beleive that should answer the question. They violated the license ...
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Corel's package management tool was linked against both libqt (version 1, not 2) and libapt (Debian's package management library, and GPLed). This was construed as a breach of the GPL, but was sorted out after the maintainer of libapt gave permission for it to be used. As well as this, the beta agreement stated that further redistribution of the software (pretty much all GPLed, remember) was forbidden.
I don't know, though. They sound like mistakes made by people who haven't really checked the GPL properly on one hand and an overzealous legal department on the other. Both were resolved fairly amicably, so I wouldn't call it "screwing" Debian.
Probably no one will give a satisfactory explanation of what Corel is accused of, or ask for their side of the story. Instead, Slashdot editors will make off-hand comments about it which will be accepted as truth by most readers without any further information. This is fairly typical.
I do appreciate getting opinions from the editors, and I know they aren't striving for objectivity in any way, but it would be nice to have links to the old stories that explained these topics so that readers can decide for themselves if Corel is truly evil or not.
There's some FUD about Corel these days, and the Slashdot/Linux community does not do it better when they abandon responsible journalism with slanted posts like "Corel screwed Debian". Back up your assertions, or shut up I say. Corel did not screw Debian -- screwing someone is deliberate and somethng I usually reserve for Microsoft (like they screwed Bristol, Spyglass, Citrix, Apple, Netscape and the regular user who doesn't understand they've been screwed...)
;)
It's safe to say that Debian more than any other distro, adheres to the "Free Software" philosophy. As such, there will be factions all over the map. Some do not want ANY commercialization of Debian and those fence-sitters have their fingers on the trigger itching for any company to make a mistake. Well, Corel made mistakes. Corel made mistakes with licensing, and Corel made some technical decisions that could be interpreted as mistakes (or arrogance). I do not think Corel has bad karma like say Microsoft or Sun, or we wouldn't see tremendous GIFTS such as WINE patches, free Corel Photopaint (amazing app!), and a staunch promotion of Linux knowing this can't turn them around overnight... and then some of us feel the need to spit in their face.
These people are still working their asses off to mature a necessary part of the applications market knowing that they've got another painful amputation/layoff on the way. If Corel disappears tomorrow, I feel they have made a positive impact on Linux that is every bit as good as Red Hat's, even if they were clumsy at times.
Corel made some technical decisions to break compatability with Slink (if you were not careful). What did that give them? It gave them a clear lead over anyone else in terms of usability from a Windows-convert point of view. Sure, it's all window dressing: the Printer Setup Wizard, Samba Wizard, the neat fonts, X-based dselect clone, the flash bootup and shutdown screens that look better than WIndows, and an installer my grandmother could sail through in 20 mins (it even handles booting NT correctly). This is all stuff you won't see as GPL'd Linux tools until 2001. I ran Corel 1.1 in the office, and 3 coworkers were so impressed they copied the CD. They've never run Linux before. Me, I run Debian Potato w/ some Woody, but if it weren't for the still-awful browser landscape in Linux I'm sure it could replace Windows for MOST people rather than some people. (Yeah, I know the browser stuff is getting better... Galeon w/ Gecko has motion blur these days it moves so fast).
Leave the FUD to that computer illiterate guy at ABC News -- he'll be writing gardening advice in a few years
I don't know how badly Copeland screwed Debian (I use it, and I've only heard this event referred to vaguely), but the one thing that puts Corel in a good light in my mind is their contribution to the WINE effort. Corel has been crucial in getting WINE to the state it is today (not perfect, but definately promising). Corel are definately not angels, and probably haven't been as nice to Free Software as IBM or SGI have, but Corel's extensive support of Linux was a very important factor in legitimizing Linux in the eyes of PHBs everywhere.
I know folks here on Slashdot will no doubt mailbomb me for saying so, but I have installed Corel Linux on a couple of machines and I have to say I was very pleased with both the install proceedure and the results. It installed flawlessly on my wife's Toshiba laptop as well. I have used various other distros from (RH, Mandrake (which is almost the same thing as RH in any case), Storm, Turbolinux, etc) and overall preferred either RH or Mandrake, but Corel was certainly a good distro to let someone who is new to Linux loose with.
Of course, now I am playing with FreeBSD and loving the experience. I guess I am an OS junkie...(BeOS was fun too)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
There are several possibilities that come to mind as faintly plausible alternatives:
Mind you, the KDE/Debian Packaging Project disproves that that is the case...
I installed Corel Linux on a laptop and added in all sorts of development tools from "Debian most-modern."
But none of these seem particularly convincing.
Presumably the person that contributed the story can elaborate on this by augmenting such a list with a real and true violation of Debian that Corel is responsible for?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
They also screwed up MetaCreations' product line. They bought up almost all of MetaCreations' products, and now where are they? In development limbo. Dammit...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
... I've said it before, and I will say it again.
Please test the KatzBot in tacohell ONLY.
Thank you
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
If anything, Corel increased Debian's popularity by allowing people unfamiliar with Linux to get started with it. Doesn't sound like "screwing Debian" to me.
.tgz packages (and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hate it when package management software bitches at you "PACKAGE X IS NOT INSTALLED" when in fact it is installed; you just compiled it by yourself instead of installing a retarded package).
Personally, I use Slackware. There is nothing better than
IMHO, there is no future for WordPerfect/Corel Office on either the UNIX or Windows platform.
Without open source code or a component model for developers, I don't see how they can progress with those products and expect support in marketplace.
Competing against Microsoft Office and now against the GNOME foundation, they look to be left out in the cold.
There are a lot of small offices and legacy applications built around WordPerfect functionality but I don't see a profitable business strategy there.
Hopefully with Cowpland leaving, someone can step up and save Corel as a company even if they have to strip it down.
Micheal Cowpland has done a lot of good for the high-tech industry in Ottawa and in Canada. I hope he can keep it going.