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Corel May Have A Buyer For Its Linux Division
SimJockey writes: "Looks like Corel is getting out of the Linux distro business." According to an anonymous source, says the article, "a newly formed company called Xandros will pay $2 million for the Linux unit, a division that comprised about 14 percent of Corel's total business as of January 2001." The Corel distro did some things well, so good things may come out of this sale.
When i first saw the headline, i thought it said, "Corel May Have A Buyer For Its Linux Distribution" and said to myself, "Woah! They might actually sell their first copy!"
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Hopefully a startup might be able to manage the distribution better than Corel has, with tighter focus and better communication with the community. The downside is that I will miss Corel's excellent presentations at OLS.
I talked to some developers with Corel a couple of years ago when they were just getting into the Linux market (it was at a job fair when I was looking for work) and they seemed pretty keen on how they were going to bring a fully integrated GUI to the Linux desktop (integrated as in from install through to user's desktop--like Windows does).
I liked the idea, and was especially happy to hear that it was a Canadian company. That said, I always thought Copland was a little flakey, and as it turned out his 'Copland Research Labs' got rid of him--and unfortunatly it seems their Linux distro. What can you expect when MS invests in you though?
I just wonder if all of Corel's GUI work was proprietary, or if it might be released Open Source with the distro's move?
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
It is estimated by PC Data that Corel's Linux division sells about 25 percent of all Linux operating systems for desktop computers, second only to Red Hat .
REALLY???
BlackNova Traders
This may be true. But I wonder what it would take to convince open-sourcers ? Is the validity of open source as a business strategy a valid, debatable hypothesis, or is its validity really just a matter of faith that could never be questioned no matter what ?
"Linux, created 10 years ago this month by Finnish computer programming student Linus Torvalds, has become a popular software system used to run Web sites and is seen as a rival to Microsoft Windows, the dominant software used in personal computers."
Is it just me, or is it getting more and more annoying having to read this line in every single article ever written about Linux? I'm surprised they didn't subsequently define 'computer'.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Steve Ballmer, is that you? Quit trolling /.!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Mandrake is arguably the best desktop distribution around, but still has a lot of shortcomings. It's simply sloppy and unpolished in some areas, and their QA process seems rushed.
It's good to finally see some competition in the Linux KDE-based desktop-focused distro market.
No, it's a heavily modified Debian distrib. Very "dumbed-down", almost to the point of useless. I guess they were trying to compete with Windows. The GUI install was a custom job, so that's part of what they're selling.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Corel is selling it (the Linux division) because of the change in leadership. The former chief executive thought it was the future of the company but Burney thought they were putting more money into it than they needed to," said a source who wished to remain anonymous.
Xandros does not even have a website yet.
But I'd like to give them a bit of user-end advice.
I have a friend who is working-class and got a computer with Linux because he couldn't afford Windows, and he needs something to write with.
To get Linux to people like him, you need to do what AOL is doing - sell or give away Linux distributions out of little TAKE ONE hoppers at computer stores and supermarkets, on every continent on earth.
They should be packaged with Internet access as well.
Goat sex free since 2001
Is the validity of open source as a business strategy a valid, debatable hypothesis, or is its validity really just a matter of faith that could never be questioned no matter what ?
From my experiences here, I would say the latter. I've now had several conversations where people cite various companies (Red Hat, Cygnus, VA Linux, Mandrake, etc.) as examples of open source business successes. I then point out that those companies are and were not profitable, and the people I am talking to just fall silent. It doesn't appear that real-world considerations and evidence have anything to do with the religious belief in the profitability of the open source business model.
Tim
At my old job, I was the resident Linux geek.
One day, a coworker brought in a copy of Corel that had come in the back of Linux Magazine. Knowing absolutely nothing about Linux, he was able to install it on a spare machine and have it view all of the machines on his Windows network.
Corel had a great 'Network Neighborhood' thing in KDE that actually worked, right from the start
He told me that the install consisted of clicking 'OK' 5 times.
One more Linux user that we probably wouldn't have if he'd gotten a copy of Slackware with his magazine. *That* is the value that Corel adds.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
"I firmly beleive that any company that views software as a product and can't adapt to a service model is living on barrowed time. "
Do you consider a spell checker to be a product or a service?
The value of Corel to Linux community has always been their ownership of their application assets. Divorcing the applications from the Linux side of the business is a net loss for Linux.
What's to become of Wordperfect and friends? This is one less incentive to port them, or parts of them, to Linux. In fact, it may provide less incentive to support them on Linux period.
Of course if these products weren't held hostage by proprietary licences, we wouldn't be in this dilemna now, would we?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
RH and others understand this. Corel didn't. They tried to rush ahead, invested too much in their own software (and in marketing and such: Corel boxes where everywhere ). They isolated themselves from Linux community, aiming to the larger market of computers users. But their product was not enough palatable for this market, owned my MS: not enough compatible with MS software, still based on an OS that most hardware vendors do not support, sold at the same price of Windows 95/98, which most users don't see as a cost because it is pre-installed on any new PC.
Therefore Corel failed. But there is money in Linux. Maybe not the quick and fast money that corporations and shareholders would like, however. More the slow but steadily increasing money coming from a well-done work and from the availability of a large amount of 'building blocks' from which professionals and amateurs around the world can build their own personal computer solutions.
Ciao
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FB
So I guess Debian isn't a REAL linux distro? You could update Corel to Debian (though it broke their samba integration into the file manager and a few other of their "improvements") so you could look at Corel as an easier way to install Debian! What EXACTLY prevented Corel from being a REAL linux distro? (My guess is nothing, your just a flamebait merchant)
If you had your way I guess no-one would be allowed to run linux unless they can install a system from source over the web from a base floppy using a text editor to adjust the mbr and partition table.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source