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Corel Chief On Corel, Open Source, .NET And Others
taylor_b writes "CEO Chief Derek Burney has some interesting ideas about open source. Among other things he says in this interview that the open source concept is 'one notch better' when you keep the code to yourself. And Corel wonders why the community never received them with open arms?" It's actually more interesting than just that comment - Burney has an interesting perspective on what's needed to make Linux/Open Source ultimately work. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm sure you folks can debate it *grin*
Their perspective on OSS is now very warped, but the sad fact is that the Corel case may indeed prove that a successful company has to concern itself with whether or not OSS can be long-term viable - especially for operating systems. Perhaps they have a point - that giving away and adhering to open standards and api's is a better solution than giving away all the source code.
Quite frankly your case here is paper thin. Corel has been a technology chasers for years always in search of "The Next Big Thing"(tm). Perhaps you'd like to ask Corel how their Java based office suite is coming? Or their Linux based office suite? Or their .NET office suite? Please, this is an old company which has no spring in it's step and no creative vision left in them. They are merely content to chase the lastest passing fad much like that dog in your neighborhood who cases every car that zooms by. Corel finally got it's nose clipped for chasing one passing car too many. The company has lacked a clear vision for their future for some time now and they're finally paying the piper.
I find it amusing that you use Corel as your model of a "long-term" linux company. How long were they even actively in "The Linux Market"? six months? a year perhaps? If anything Corel proves that an old company can't reinvent itself by sprinkling a bit of linux pixie dust (or insert buzzword here) on itself. Corel was a grandiose failure all right but it wasn't because of any inherent flaws with making money from OSS. Corel's ultimate failure was that of it's flip flop management. Changing the wholesale direction (and culture) of your ship every 6-12 months won't get you anywhere and you will likely find yourself lost at the end. Corel proved this in spades. Call me when you start to see the likes of Red Hat, IBM and Mandrake pulling up stakes and moving out of the OS bazaar. Then I'll really start to become concerned about the long term viability of OSS business models. Until then we'll have to wait and see how well OSS businesses scale.
But companies like Corel, even to a degree RedHat, and especially Microsoft, (also, to a lesser degree Sun) really don't care much about the slashdot crowd. This is for a few reasons.
This type of knee jerk bashing of Red Hat is becoming all to common nowadays here at /. The kind that goes, "You know Microsoft, Corel, Red Hat all those big morally bankrupt companies." Just ask RMS what he thinks of RH and he'll tell you that RH does the right thing for Free Software almost all of the time (who can agree with RMS 100% of the time anyway?). Anyone who employs Allen Cox full time doesn't belong in the dubious company that you place them. And no, I don't use Red Hat but I think your grouping of them with the likes of MS, Sun and Corel is highly unfair and distasteful.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Commerically successfuly OS's like Windows are popular and profitable not because they are the best, but because its good enough.
Lest it be forgotten, Windows is popular because Microsoft used illegal tactics to make sure everyone who bought a computer also bought a copy of Windows, not because it's "good enough."
However, if what you meant was that people continue to use Windows because it is good enough, then you're right. For most people, the marginal cost of moving to another platform is greater than the percieved benefit of doing so.
I love free software. My wife and I have been free of Microsoft products at home for almost three years now, and free of commercial software at home for well over a year. I've successfully integrated two FreeBSD servers and two OpenBSD servers into my employer's network after convincing management that it was the right thing to do. I really, truly believe in free software.
But I don't see the masses switching to it for their OS and apps anytime soon, unfortunately.
Insightful? Not really.
RedHat seems to be making money (Just so very close to turning an actual profit per share... If they weren't making money on it, they'd not be in that position). Others seem to make money off of it- IBM, for example.
You just can't make money the way Corel attempted to do it.
They screwed up bigtime. Rather than making solid apps for Linux, they attempted to embrace and extend it- tried to offer an "end-to-end" solution in a position where they weren't ready to provide it. (And on reflection, I don't think they could have ever really pulled it off- it'd take a company with the resources of IBM or HP to pull it off if at all.)
They wasted time and money on NetWinder (which is an amazing piece of hardware) by designing it and then going nowhere with it. Dumb move.
They wasted time and money doing a Linux distribution on their own when they could have partnered with another distribution vendor and worked together. It's now been revealed why they wasted that energy- they wanted total control of it all.
They spent time and money that could have been spent making cross-platform versions or slightly differing, but functionality complete of their applications (a' la WordPerfect 8 for Unix) doing WINE upgrades so that they could be lazy and migrate the Windows versions over. While the benefits to WINE have been immense, the results on their apps have been lackluster. The applications require quite a bit more muscle than other contemporary comparable applications under Linux.
Do you really think they've got a solid grasp on things as they are? They've been grasping at straws for years now, since they lost their focus on things and started buying up WordPerfect, etc. I mean, look at all the other spectacular failed business decisions (that were debatable at best) such as that all-Java version of their office suite (when Java really wasn't ready for that sort of thing!). They've not a clue. Apparently haven't had one for a while from the looks of things from this end.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What gold? The guy was right. You cannot make a profit off an item that is free. It does not generate revenue. Revenue is money and without it, a company cannot run. Linux is not gold, gold is money. Linux is free, it is sand between our toes that gets irritating from time to time.
To be perfectly blunt, I guy as far up in Corel as he is knows a thing or two about business. Not some kid from Ohio who has yet to take Economics. A good business man knows when somthing has gone awry and the best thing to do is back out. I agree totally.
Open Source maybe a good thing for some, but it is not the answer to the computing world. If it was, it would be Corel and RedHat buying Microsoft stock and not the other way around. It amazes me to see how many Linux fans walk around with their eyes closed. People smart enough to use a complex OS can't even see the reality of the situation.
~AdmrlNxn
~Admrlnxn
"I got your mom in my trunk"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I most heartily disagree with this sentiment. There are many ways to make money with open source software, but it is more work because you have to ADD VALUE. If you cease to add value, no one has an incentive to come to you for customization work, or assistance integrating the software into an existing system. Tech support doesn't cut it.
I think a better way to put it is that there is no way for a company like Corel to make money with Open Source. This is not a moral criticism, just a fact. Corel is structured in a way that they need to recoup money from licenses to create software. It's not that coding can't get paid for, it's that you need a revenue stream to support overhead.
I personally am in a similar position, although orders of magnitude smaller. I'd like to open source the project I'm working on, but I work with a team of people, a sales person, an office manager, an engineer, all of whom contributed in critical organizational and conceptual ways to making the project a possibility. They all have to paid out of the fruits of my labor. There are consulting fees, but they are too low and transaction costs too high to support everyone we need. If the product were open source, I would have a much easier time selling my labor -- I'd give the product away for free and charge for changes and make a good living adding value. All the other people who have worked just as hard but who aren't coders would be out of luck.
In other words, I'm stuck with overhead. And overhead in this case is people. My friends and coworkers.
When projects like the Linux kernel or Apache self organize around a group of hackers, there is no overhead, no secretaries or salesmen or janitors to be paid. This is a good thing, when it can happen.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Looks like he also said that he has no idea of where he's going next and (later on in the intervies) that if he did, the legal department would make him keep his mouth shut. Mostly, he was self contradicting and vauge. That's what happens when you get Borg implants.
Eliminating Corel's MS dependency was a good idea poorly deployed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Of course we can all disagree with him on that too, but misquoting him doesn't look professional!
PS: And please run your submissions through a spellchecker before publishing.
Zax
-- We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms.
Microsoft has a consistent business strategy of waiting to see what their competitors do, watch them make the mistakes, and then release software that's a generation behind what their competitors are sporting, but tie it close enough to their other products that the other vendors' products aren't as worthwhile to use. With a few exceptions (Microsoft Bob), few Microsoft products have ever failed miserably due to the level of integration and marketing, although Microsoft still refuses to acknowledge that Bob was a failure (official company line is it was 'ahead of it's time').
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
What Burney further fails to understand is that there is no surviving viable market for proprietary consumer applications either. That market is squarely divided between Microsoft (who will ensure there is no serious competition to their products in proprietaryland) and the free alternatives. There simply isnt any niche to fill between anymore.
People would rather go with a pirated copy of Office than buy a decent cheaper office suite that fulfills their needs. Or they will go with the entirely free one.
How do you miss the fact that it's about Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer? Isn't that repeated so many times, over and over again, from thousands of directions?
No wonder they couldn't pull off a Linux distribution; all they saw was the early marketing hype, the high stock prices, and tried to capitalize on the buzz.
Linux was the big thing on the horizon; now that the market has cooled a bit, and the next big buzz is .Net, lo and behold, Corel is racing to be a market leader.
What a useless company.
I've been following this .Net thing and I'll give Corel and MS the credit that they're the famous ones of the bunch who've been thinking the same things. That's as far as I go.
I have a different tack on the whole source deal. Source is useless nowadays from a reuse standpoint. Do you want to wade through OpenOffice? or Mozilla? It's a god damned zoo.
Or how about the hundred times I've asked where I could start from to be able to tweak the virtual memory management of Linux because I have certain needs to take care of. No one can tell me. I suppose I could meditate in front of that humongous 2.4.0 call trace poster.
What I'd prefer is function source. A scan of source is performed so that a functional subset is produced. Second every mountain of source can be translated into the internal source standards a company lives by. That way you have internal standard A, performance filter A1, General functional core B, performance filter C1, and internal standard C.
Companies A and C keep their respective source and the standards, where as B becomes a general resource.
Benefits: an end to fragmentation. The translation is performed by a computer therefore any claims of incompatibility and vendor lock-in are erased. The standards could even be derived by the computer so that teams that wish to perform a rock solid translation by hand can avoid doing extra work during the next patch. They'd be teaching the computer so to speak.
Companies compete on performance as they open up the possibility of people to do their own work and actually own software without putting the company at a risk of losing its edge.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Actually, I think Bill got this one mostly right, just that MSN didn't turn out to be the proprietary online service of choice - AOL did.
AOL has by far more subscribers than any other online service, and the vast majority of those people are not accessing the "Internet", but are instead using it for AOL E-mail, AOL Instant Messaging, AOL chat rooms, AOL shopping and AOL bulletin boards. Sure, the underlying backbone of this is the Internet, but the entire experience is wrapped in a nice, proprietary front end essentially design to keep you in AOL's area of cyberspace.
I think the AOL-Time Warner merger serves to underscore this. I don't think anyone (not even Bill ;-) could have imagined that an online service would eventually be big enough to purchase one of the largest media companies in the world. If you don't think there are millions of people who equate the terms AOL and Internet now, just wait...
Sommelier
Now, you go off spouting that he missed the point that "it's about Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer". I think it is *you* who missed the author's point.
While I agree that one of the primary goals of OSS is to be Free (as in Freedom), that was not what the author was getting at. Corel was a company with a mandate to make money, as most corporations try to do. Obviously not enough people wanted to pay for freedom, so the freedom concept of Linux wasn't profitable -- not to mention the respect of the Linux concepts as pertaining to Corel. Corel didn't make the money they wanted to, so, they dropped it.
Corel is not a non-profit organization.