Corel to Sell Off Linux Division

Newsforge (also owned by the sinister Andover keiretsu) is reporting on Corel's latest move in the world of Linux - an advance in the retrograde direction. Corel apparently plans to sell off its Debian-based distro, but retain WordPerfect and CorelDraw. Yahoo and Linux Today also have stories.

Comments

First Offer!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have $19.47 and a bus pass in my pocket I can be persuaded to part with.

Attack on WINE?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Corel was a major contributor to the WINE project. It was a good business plan when they had applications to port to Linux (WordPerfect, etc.) but now that they're splitting the linux group from the applications, the business case to continue development (and certainly the resource availability) is severely diminished.

My e-mail app just started running on WINE, and now I see no reason to run Windows at all. I suspect many others are realizing the same thing. What would WordPerfect for Linux do to the demand for Word for Linux? Somebody tell me there's no conspiracy.

Re:You have to face the facts..

[lrichardson]

In reality, only closed-source business models will EVER turn a profit. It's the business model that has worked for hundreds of years, and it'll be the only one working for the next couple hundred.

Good thing I'm a history buff, otherwise this blanket bullsh$t statement might convince me. I dunno, but it seems that carriage/cart makers could be considered 'open source', in that their product will work with any 'operating' system out there: horses, donkeys, mules, oxen, people. Worse, in times past, trade secrets just didn't exist ... yes, everybody knew how to make everyone elses products! Heck, even today, an industry as huge as life insurance is based on a few simple tables that everyone has access to.

I happen to like WordPerfect, especially in preference to Word. Reality is, the reason M$ is so successful has nothing to do with the quality of their product (hugely inferior for most of it's life), but the fact it's been sold as part of a 'package' ... a package which, strangely enough, includes it's own OS. M$ virtually gave it's various OS away, for the sole purpose of making the playing field more biased (on many levels) to their other products, such as Word.

Looking at just the OS is shortsighted: look at the whole package ... and then figure how much money they made on the combination.

Face it. Linux is communism, plain and simple

Of course, one could point out that it's more correctly socialistic,or even anarchistic, than communist, but your drivel seems to indicate you believe anything that isn't CAPITALISM (U.S. Version, T.M.) is communism. . Most of the world lives under a system that combines capitalism and socialism. Pure Capitalism is about as viable as Pure Communism, that is, not at all. Based on architecture alone, I suspect *nix will kick WinWhatever: the minor detail that tens of thousands of socially minded geeks are making a better product than the capitalistic monkeys at M$ can kinda proves that IT DOES WORK.

This was the plan all along...

[Astin]

I read an article back when Corel first introduced their version of Linux. (I actually knew about the release about a year earlier, when I got a tour of the Corel Computers offices, but that's another story...). It stated that Corel's plan, although not publicized in any way, was fairly obvious. By providing a user-friendly, Windows-like Linux distro, they could increase the number of Linux users. Knowing that M$ wouldn't likely port their apps over to Linux, they could then essentially corner the market with the WordPerfect suite. THIS is where the real money would be, not in the OS itself, but in the applications that Corel planned on building up user support for.

Have to admit, this made sense. One cannot make money on a Free OS, no matter how much you charge for the box, manuals, and support, especially in an age where high speed access is becoming more widespread, slowly making traditional distribution models (ie.- off-the-shelf) obsolete. However, by offering "crippled" versions of their applications for free, they COULD make money, especially to the market they were aiming for. Most people who would use Corel Linux wouldn't go near, say, Debian, because they want user-friendliness, and M$-like configurability. These same people would then get the online version of WP, use it, and realize they want more TrueType fonts, macros, filters, etc., that could only be obtained with the commercial version of the software. So, they would dutifully trudge out to their local store, or visit corel.com, and buy the package. The same would apply to CL versions of CorelDraw, etc..

However, there was a problem. The Linux market took a nose-dive. Suddenly the Linux buzz started dying off, and Corel dropped from $61/share to $2.50 ($CDN prices folks). Cowpland resigned, and the plan wasn't looking as feasible. So, spin off the OS now, instead of after the expected boom in usage, because the boom isn't going to happen any time soon. This way, the problem isn't theirs. They can continue to provide the apps, and over time, they just might make a profit from them, especially if the spin-off does a decent job of building and supporting CL.

Mind you, /. readers don't tend to fall into the category Corel was looking for. Not many actually use CL, some might of installed it on a separate partition just to take a look-see, but most returned to their Red-Hat/Debian/Slackware/whatever distros and happily hacked away in their xterms.

Point being, *IF* Linux had continued to stay at its peak, and *IF* Corel's version grabbed a decent share of the market, then the plan of providing the OS for free and selling the apps *COULD* have made them a mint. Unfortunately, none of the ifs were realized, so Corel is once again struggling to stay afloat.