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Corel Shuts Down Open Source Development Site
evil_one writes: "The
end is finally here for Corel, who released a Debian based linux distro a couple years ago (now owned by Xandros) Has announced that they are shutting down their Open Source Development web site as of March 1st. As many readers already know, Corel has helped the community on a huge scale, providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect. It's sad to see this, especially with the amount of work that Corel has put into Wine and their other projects, which include add-ons to KDE."
Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)
As many readers already know, Corel has helped the community on a huge scale, providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect.
Linux community != Open Source community.
As far as I know, there were never open source or free (libre) versions of Draw or WordPerfect. Releasing a linux binary is not contributing to the open source community.
I am aware they contributed some other packages, but the big two were never offered.
Kscd had a bunch of work done to it and is improved for KDE 3.0 just to let you know.
The kde usability group http://usability.kde.org itself has been going through kde applications and writing up reports on applications (both ui and bug reports). (We don't just sit down in a room with 10 mom's and do ui studies.) So even though Corel is no longer sending in reports kde still has someone working on improving the ui.
We have also started an app of the week on the mailinglist. So come every Monday we all take a look at one of the kde applications and begin to make up a lists of changes that should be implimented to make the application better. By the end of the week the majority of these changes have been handed off to someone who will get them into cvs. If you are interested in helping out in this effort or just interested in writing up a list of things in an application that don't follow the ui standard head on over to the website and join the mailinglist. Can't code, but want to help out in kde? This might be a perfect spot for you to contribute.
We are also working on improving the website to allow for usabity reports to be given just like the current kde bug report system so you can submit items with minimal effort.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
In the fiscal quarter ended 11/01, they lost 12 cents per share, and in the three quarters prior thereto they had profits of 1, 2, and 2 cents per share, respectively. The per-share loss for fiscal year '02 (ending 11/02, based on two analysts' estimates) is exepcted to be 22 cents per share. In FY '03 they are expected to make only 6 cents per share.
Having a profitable company give back to the community by supporting an open source web site is a good gesture, but Corel needs to focus on more important things at the moment.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I guess you don't understand what I was talking about. I am not talking about coming up with the new xyz widget or abc way of doing things I am talking about simply going through applications and make sure that they use the word Quit and not Exit, that the application can resize properly, the tooltips match what objects do, etc. It isn't the most wonderfull job in the world, but more often then not it is these little things that drive people up the wall. We are improving the consistancy of applications within kde.
Think of it as polishing up your car. You don't really need to, but when you do it makes your car look so much better. (and we do file bug reports too when we find them)
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
There are a lot of posts about WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and its dependence on Wine, as well as about instability. Gotta add my $0.15 (it's longer than $0.02).
I bought the product right at release, and it's true: it was based on Wine. However, it was a "special" in-house version of Wine with modifications to get WordPerfect Office 2000 to run, and the Corel Wine was much faster than the WineHQ Wine at running Office applications. In addition, because Corel Wine and the WordPerfect Office 2000 binaries for Linux were tweaked for each other, they actually worked (and do work) very well together.
We musn't forget that Corel is a smallish company and WordPerfect Office 2000 is a Windows product. To do an entire native port would have been a herculean effort and probably beyond the company's realistic abilities, certainly it would have been impossible in the time frame in which they were able to release WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
Not to mention that many Linux users are applauding TransGaming for their Wine support and calling Wine the best way to bring Linux to the masses... You can't have it both ways; if it's good enough for TransGaming, there's no point in saying that it shouldn't be good enough for Corel.
That said, there were some problems -- the installer of the original release only properly supported the major distributions (i.e. Debian, Corel, Red Hat) while minor distributions (Caldera & others) had some trouble and required by-hand rpm'ing in some cases, or other tweaks. There were also behavior problems with non-KDE-1.x desktops which led to some crashing and other effects likely to generate a poor first impression of the product. I know of several users who returned their Corel Linux products almost immediately.
Unfortunately, the response from Corel to these problems was mixed. A new installer script was released, but a service pack to fix the crashing and non-KDE problems was never made -- which is a damn shame, because the CVS version of Corel Wine hosted at opensource.corel.com did fix both the crashing and the non-KDE-1.1 behavior bugs, leading to a very functional office suite for Linux. Some in the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux community even packaged the CVS of Corel Wine up as an RPM and released it that way, and I continue to use the "unofficial" Corel Wine RPM to this day, every day, with my copy of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
So, there is no denying that Corel may be partly at fault for releasing an undertested product and then stupidly failing to release fixes which already existed and were downloadable (albeit in difficult to use form) from their Web site.
On the other hand, seen from Corel's point of view -- very poor sales and rampant piracy (which I saw myself in several offices) -- it may have been difficult to justify spending any additional capital on the Linux products once they had been launched. The problems with smaller-name distributions and non-KDE window managers likely generated lots of tech support traffic from a few squeaky wheels and a high number of product returns, while at the same time sales were (apparently) very slow. To this day, it's surprising to me just how many Linux users positively bristle when I tell them that I actually paid for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, rather than use an open-source alternative -- almost as though I were a Benedict Arnold for actually buying software.
All in all, it's just a sad thing altogether, because Corel was one of the few companies that really did take the plunge and release and market Linux products, and (once you got them installed properly) both WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux work very well -- better than most anything available for Linux to this point.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Guess I can retire this topic icon
As others have pointed out, you shouldn't retire it. I might suggest updating it, though.
-Erik
Sorry, not the case.
They never advertised, and finding a dealer was near impossible.
I tried for almost 4 months to buy corel draw for Linux.
They couldn't get me to anyone that would take my credit card number and ship me the actual product.
Corel is ran by a bunch of morons to begin with, Adobe has them beat hard in every facet of their business... and Corel will become nothing more than a footnote in business books on how not to do business.
Is it just me, or does it seem funny that Corel have said: "...this site will no longer be available as of March 1st, 2002...", and on the very next line: "At Corel, we have developed a strong commitment to the Open Source community..."?
As for formatting, it seems that legal documents have none. The standard legal form is pretty much typewriter-emulation, maybe with line-numbers. I think your argument about control codes is 100% wrong -- the real issue was Word's word count behavior (and I think that's been fixed).
With no formatting required, any old version of WordPerfect (including 5.1) is good enough -- and lots of lawyers still use 5.1/DOS because they've memorized the magic FKey combos. (From what I can tell most of the legal industry is on WP v7 or earlier, with a substantial chunk on v5 or v6. Current verion is v9.)
There's also pre-built templates, macros, integrated document management add-ons, and so on which make it difficult for law firms to move to another word processor.
Although, I hear from my brother who clerks in a large legal firm that they've rolled out MS Office 2000 to everyone's desk. Apparently the younger lawyers don't like WP as well as their elders. And there's the PR issue of some clients thinking that they are technologically backwards for using WordPerfect.
But the real bottom-line is that the legal profession probably spends the least on IT of any US industry. The computer environments are usually like a bad early 90s flashback - Paradox, Novell 3, 56K Frame Relay. That's why they still use WordPerfect.