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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 ;)
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